


by the claw of dragon

by sunbrights



Category: Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-09-16 18:42:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 50,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9285053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunbrights/pseuds/sunbrights
Summary: The Kuzuryuu Clan stands on the precipice of the greatest era of its history. Kuzuryuu Natsumi promises to be the strongest leader the clan has ever seen, the Overlord of the South born again. That Hopes's Peak Academy would select her for it's 77th class was assumed, not hoped for.To the younger Kuzuryuu son, everything is as it's meant to be.





	1. Chapter 1

The Kuzuryuu family arrives to the entrance ceremony in the compound’s entire fleet of armored cars. In the first, there is only Natsumi and her father. In the second, her mother and brother ride with her aunt and three of her first cousins (the eldest, Yuuto, has not been welcome in their territory for almost two decades). In the third, there are the personal servants and bodyguards of anyone in the first two.

The other seven contain the rest of her family: blood relatives and loyal underlings who have earned the right to stand alongside them.

(“They are here to witness the beginning of a new era in our history,” her father tells her on the way there. “It starts today, whether you’re prepared for it or not.”

Natsumi listens to the steady hum of the car’s engine, and looks him in the eye. “I am.”

Her father says nothing. She can't tell if he approves or agrees, or doesn't. He only nods, and leans over to pour himself a drink from the bar.)

They form a massive block of the audience, a swath of dark suits, expensive jewelry, and mostly-concealed weaponry. The others in the crowd give them a wide berth, and Natsumi can’t help but grin in her seat.

The senior student council president recites something about hope and history and the school’s mission statement. Natsumi isn’t sure; she’s not listening. She doesn’t care about what Hope’s Peak stands for, or how it thinks it’ll change the world. She cares about what it has to offer her and her family: resources, connections, and opportunities. 

If it couldn’t give her that, she wouldn’t waste a single second more here.

All the families crowd the students after the ceremony, and Natsumi receives hers in a line out on the grass, Peko behind her left shoulder and Fuyuhiko behind her right. Her father insists; he’s the one that corrals all of them, and then he waits off to the side with her mother until Natsumi’s seen every single one. 

For the first few minutes, it’s fine; her aunt clasps both of Natsumi’s hands in hers and says a prayer for the family’s future right then and there, and her cousin Rin shows her the World War I-era pistol she’d managed to get off a collector as payment for outstanding debts. But as the line proceeds and the number of faces already familiar to her start to dwindle, Natsumi begins to understand why her father arranged it this way.

“Natsumi-chan!” Togawa Minato is a grand uncle, who married into the family eight years ago. He reaches out to take her hands, and she folds them behind her back instead. He falters, fingers outstretched into the empty air between them. “Y-You’ve grown into a magnificent woman since I saw you last, Natsumi-chan. Truly. Truly.” Natsumi only looks at him, and without anything to grab he starts to wring his hands instead. “I did have a small favor to ask, if you’ll hear me out. Your mother and I go way back of course, of course, you remember my beautiful wife, and we’re in need of a small loan—”

“We can arrange something with my mother,” Natsumi tells him. “I’m sure she’d _love_ to hear why you decided to presume so much about her generosity.”

He pales. “Oh. Oh, no, no, no. N-No need. I wouldn’t want to bother your honorable mother with such a trifling thing. I’ll be on my way, of course, congratulations again, Natsumi-chan!”

It goes on like that for a while. Most are only here to butter her up before she leaves for school, but some have the stones to ask for more immediate favors: money and contracts and forgiveness. Natsumi knows her father is watching her, and she handles them.

“Lemme guess,” Fuyuhiko mutters eventually. He’s been fidgeting for the past fifteen minutes. “This one wants to know if you can convince the old man to give him an extension on what he owes him after they played cards that one time they were our age.” 

“No way,” she whispers back. “He wants free drugs. One million percent.”

“Bullshit.” 

“Two bags of karinto says it’s drugs.”

She can feel him glowering at the back of her head. “Fine,” he hisses after the man has introduced himself as second cousin Jun, visiting from the United States. “You’re on.”

It takes five seconds for second cousin Jun to clasp her hand and step close to ask her, “Exactly how big _are_ the shipments coming out of Taiwan?” and only five more for Peko to remove him from the line. Natsumi bites her lip to keep herself from laughing while Fuyuhiko swears in her ear.

They go back and forth; it makes handling the last third of the line less of an excruciating bore than it might have been otherwise. In the final tally, he owes her three bags of karinto and Peko a lemon soda. (Natsumi had been able to goad her into guessing exactly once: she’d blown the both of them out of the water by identifying the sibling of another student who’d snuck into the line to ask for work, and then had removed him, too.)

“Look who it is,” Fuyuhiko whispers. Their cousin Yuina has cut to the front of the line; Natsumi remembers her face from childhood playdates that had ended a long, long time ago. “She thinks she’s better than us. Thinks it’s supposed to be her and not you.” He grunts when Yuina comes up from the head of the line, all smiles and false friendliness. “What now, bitch.”

Natsumi sputters a laugh right into their cousin’s simpering face.

Yuina ends up stomping away, red-faced and fuming. It doesn’t matter in the long term, not with her family so far down in the clan hierarchy, but the murmuring from the line turns their father’s head. Natsumi clears her throat.

“I think the young mistress has the rest of things in hand, Fuyuhiko-sama,” Peko murmurs. Her voice is too light and too warm; Peko is good at a lot of things, but telling off Fuyuhiko will never be one of them.

“What, being fought over like some kinda prize ham?” he whispers back. “Yeah, I think so too.” He pinches the back of Natsumi's arm. “Like you really needed Peko to say that for you.”

Natsumi smiles wide at the next person in line, a second cousin once removed from Yokohama whose given name starts with either E or F. “No,” she whispers, “I just figured you’d like it better coming from her.”

Fuyuhiko has nothing to say about second-cousin-once-removed Eikō from Yokohama. Or anyone else after that.

*

Her parents stay long enough to confirm that her things have been properly delivered and unpacked in her dorm room. Her mother gathers her up in a bear hug before they leave, and even her father reaches out to wrap one strong arm around her shoulders.

Fuyuhiko lingers at the door, and waves their parents off when they’re finished with their goodbyes. “We gotta take care of something,” he tells them, “I’ll catch up.”

He follows her and Peko to the school store, and argues with her the whole way about the odds of Yuina posting a vague message on social media before the night is out. (Natsumi’s position is that she absolutely is, and that he absolutely needs to find it and take a screenshot of it for her.)

“There’s your karinto.” He slaps the bags into her open hands, fresh from the vending machine. Natsumi pops one open right then and there, just for the look on his face. 

“Good luck,” he tells her anyway, hands deep in his pockets. “Don’t fuck it up.”

She hugs him then, too, half because he hates it and half because it already feels weird, being separated from him. He elbows her in the ribs until she lets go, but not before she feels him pat her back with one hand.

“Don’t forget!” She points at the drink machine, and swipes the edge of her sleeve against the corner of her eye when his back is turned. “You owe Peko, too.”

“That’s not necessary,” Peko says, even though Fuyuhiko is already pressing the buttons. “The young mistress should—”

The soda clatters into the bottom of the vending machine, and Fuyuhiko bends to grab it. “ _She_ got it wrong. You won fair and square.” He holds the bottle out, and Natsumi looks up at the ceiling when Peko glances over to her for help. “What’re you sayin’, I shouldn’t pay my debts?”

“No,” Peko answers, and she reaches to take the bottle with both hands. “Of course not. Thank you.”

He rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah. Anyway— I should go. Mom’ll lose it if we get home too late to have dinner on time.”

“Like she’s not going to lose it anyway,” Natsumi says.

“Yeah, and I’m the one who’s gotta deal with it, right?”

He tilts his head back in Peko’s direction, and Natsumi fights the urge to roll her eyes. It’s the same every time and he doesn’t even know it. He lifts his chin instead of waving because it looks cooler, eyes creasing at the corners because he’s trying not to smile, and Natsumi considers herself a top tier sister for not gagging right there on the carpet.

“Later, Peko.”

“Goodbye, Fuyuhiko-sama.”

They leave at the same time, in opposite directions down the hallway.

*

There are introductions the first day of class, even though it’s pointless. Anyone with half a brain and ten minutes of spare time would have done enough googling to put names to faces. (Natsumi knows much more than just names and faces by now, but not everyone here is her. She’s generous enough to give them a lower bar.) She doesn’t see the point in separating them into classes at all, but the school seems determined to pretend it’s even halfway normal, at least in the first few days.

Natsumi stands when it’s her turn, and when she tilts her head, so does Peko.

No one in the room misses it.

“Kuzuryuu Natsumi,” she says. It starts right away, eyes shifting and people leaning across desk aisles to whisper. A swell of satisfaction lifts her chin. “Nice to meet you, I guess.”

Peko bows her head, on cue. “I am Pekoyama Peko. It’s nice to meet everyone.”

That’s all anyone ever needs: Natsumi’s name, and Peko’s sword. The rest sinks in on its own. Natsumi sits, counts to five in her head, and then she sorts them.

There are three who won’t meet her eyes at all: Tsumiki, Souda, and Hanamura.

There are four who seem too stupid to understand what’s in front of them: Owari, Mioda, Nanami, and Komaeda.

That leaves five potentials: Nidai, Saionji, Tanaka, Sonia, and Mitarai.

Well. Five potentials, and one more:

“Oh, wow. Look who it is, Peko-chan!” She laughs behind her hand when Koizumi stands up, loud enough to get as many pairs of eyes to swing toward her as possible. “Did you get lost on your way to the Reserve Course, Koizumi-san? I didn’t think they’d even let trash like you through the gate.”

“Hey, hey.” The teacher stirs behind his desk; he doesn’t raise his head, but he does flick the edge of his hat up to look at her properly. He reeks of tequila. Natsumi assumed he was dead. “Let’s treat our classmates with respect, yeah?”

“Back off, Natsumi,” Koizumi says over him. “I have just as much of a right to be here as you do.”

“Ohhh, I remember. The pictures, right? Sure, sure. They were kind of cute, I guess.” Natsumi leans back in her seat, and makes sure her smile is wide. “My bad. Go on.”

Koizumi does, and even manages to keep her face from flushing red until after she’s already sat down again. Frustration or embarrassment, Natsumi doesn’t really care which. If she’d known they’d actually be put in the same class together, she would have done something about it, but it’s too late now. She’ll just need to handle it, like everything else.

“Right, right. Nice to meet everyone,” Kizakura says, after Nanami has spent thirty seconds standing at her desk playing her game, completely silent. Natsumi thinks the odds that he was listening to any of them at all are pretty low. “We’ve got about thirty-five minutes left.” He burps into his hand and tries to pass it off as a cough. “So, uh, unstructured free time, I guess.”

It’s about as much as any of them expected. A few people chat quietly, but most everyone else works on their own: Mioda plucks a few notes out on her guitar, Tanaka encourages his hamsters through a relay race on his desk, Souda tinkers with some kind of robot that looks like it could either be a dog or a chicken

Natsumi takes stock.

Her list has shrunk since the start of class: Tanaka had talked for five straight minutes and said almost nothing, and she still has a headache from Nidai’s shouting. Mitarai had been soft-spoken and stuttery in his introduction, not at all what she expected after the cool stare he’d given her after hers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much.

She has unstructured free time to burn. No reason not to test a few theories.

Natsumi stands, stretches (she can feel eyes on her, but there’s fewer now; people are learning), and follows a winding path toward the front of the classroom. She bumps Koizumi’s desk with her hip on the way there, scattering photographs across the floor.

Koizumi glares. “Watch it.”

Natsumi smiles at her, and twists one of them under her shoe. “Oops. Really sorry, Koizumi-san.”

Mitarai is looking at her. When she meets his eye this time, his head drops immediately back down towards his desk. He quails under her scrutiny, shoulders drawn up and face pressed so close to his tablet he might smudge it with his nose. 

She kicks the picture under her foot toward him. “Hey, Mitarai-kun,” she says, “I think one of Koizumi-san’s pictures fell over there. Can you grab it?”

“Oh.” He lifts his head, but he’s looking past her, at a point somewhere behind her shoulder. “Um.” He bends, and holds the picture out to her.

The flip-flop is almost even more pathetic than the ones who’d known not to stare right off the bat. A miscalculation on her part, or maybe some temporary bravery on his. Either way, he’s not worth wasting time on. 

She plucks the picture from his fingers and tosses it back onto Koizumi’s desk, dust and all. “Hey,” Koizumi snaps, “You can’t just walk around here like you own the place. You—”

Natsumi ignores her. She turns her back on Koizumi's self-righteous lecture and raises her voice just enough to carry. “Hey, Peko-chan?”

Peko lifts her head. She’s near the front, behind Souda. “Yes, young mistress.”

“It’s kind of a pain with you sitting all the way over there and me all the way over here. Do you see somewhere we can sit together?”

Peko doesn’t need to be told what to do. She makes as if scanning the room for empty spots. “I’m sorry, young mistress. They all look to be taken already.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I bet we could trade with somebody.” 

Natsumi reaches over Souda’s shoulder to pluck his dog-or-chicken robot off of his desk; he jerks in his seat, and the noise that comes out of his throat is somewhere between a whine and a yell. She hops up to sit on the edge of his desk, and fiddles with one of the robot’s loose screws. “So! Souda-kun.” She smiles down at him; his eyes are so big they could fall out of his head. She points to an empty desk in the back corner. “You sit there now.”

“H-Hey. You can’t—”

“What? You don’t want me and Peko-chan to be able to sit together?” She indicates past his shoulder with a tilt of her head, and she knows he doesn’t need to turn around to picture Peko behind him, tall and cold and immovable. “We’re inseparable, you know.”

“No, that’s not what I—”

“Then what’s the problem? You don’t mind swapping desks, do you?”

“It’s just that I—”

Natsumi leans down into his space. She holds the little robot under his nose. “You what?” 

His teeth clack together when his jaw snaps shut. “That’s what I thought,” Natsumi says, and drops the robot into his lap. He jumps straight up in the air, knees knocking against the underside of the desk, and nearly falls over himself scrambling out of it. Natsumi waits until he’s clutched his books and bag against his chest and hurled himself toward the back of the room, and hops into his empty seat.

“I feel you may have been too harsh with Souda-san,” Sonia says from her right. 

“ _I_ just did you a favor,” Natsumi tells her. She stretches out wide into the seat, arms crossed behind her head. “Did you see the way that guy was looking at you? Eugh.” Sonia did see; she’d been looking straight forward at the blackboard when Natsumi came in the room, even when Souda leaned forward to try and catch her gaze. Natsumi shudders to hammer the feeling home. “He’s a stalker-in-training. Now, instead of a creeper, you’ve got your year back. You’re welcome.”

“He can be a little… much sometimes, that is true.” Sonia rolls her shoulders in what Natsumi thinks is probably the princess-equivalent of a shudder. “It is what it is, I suppose.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Natsumi grins at her. “You can owe me one.”

*

Natsumi spends afternoon homeroom in the dojo with Peko. There’s no point in going back to class today; Kizakura is a pushover, and there’s no official punishment from the school even if he wasn’t. She made the impression she needed to make. (She ate lunch alone, the entire table empty except for her and Peko.) It’ll solidify better the longer she lets them stew in it.

Besides, what’s the point of being at this school if she still has to sit in some boring class, anyway?

She sits by the lockers instead, out of the way enough that she won’t be caught in the crossfire of any Ultimate Archers or Gunslingers or whatever else, and watches Peko rise and fall through her forms. Natsumi names each one in her head as she goes (Ippon-me), the way she has since they were both small and Peko was just beginning to learn.

(Her father had strong objections toward her sitting in on Peko’s lessons, at first. He’d thought it was inappropriate and that Natsumi’s time could be better spent. 

If they were meant to work together, she’d argued back, it only made sense for her to know exactly what and how much Peko was capable of. 

Natsumi had gotten her way.)

There are times now when Peko moves too quickly through them for Natsumi to see the transition between each one. (Nihon-me.) When that happens, she sits in on as many more of Peko’s practices as she needs to until she gets it right. If she lets the gap get too big, she’ll never catch up, and she refuses to let that happen.

Today, Peko goes through them more slowly than normal. Natsumi knows she’s doing it on purpose; she’s adjusting to the new environment, new equipment, and new training partners. Even when her partner trips over herself trying to show-off to the new Ultimate Swordswoman, Peko keeps the same slow, measured pace.

Peko has nothing to prove to anyone.

(Sanbon-me.)

Natsumi rifles her phone out of her bag, and texts her brother.

**me**  
14:09  
(Party Popper )(Earth Globe Asia-Australia ≊ Globe Showing Asia-Australia)(Information Desk Person )

She doesn’t expect him to answer right away, and he doesn’t. (Yonhon-me.) She taps her phone against her cheek and waits until it buzzes in her palm.

**fuyu-chan**  
14:13  
when the fuck are you going to start using words like a grown up

**me**  
14:13  
(Thumbs Down Sign ≊ Thumbs Down)(Thumbs Down Sign ≊ Thumbs Down)(Thumbs Down Sign ≊ Thumbs Down)

**fuyu-chan**  
14:13  
you shouldn’t even be texting in class anyway

**me**  
14:13  
i’m not in class

**fuyu-chan**  
14:13  
the hell is that supposed to mean

**fuyu-chan**  
14:14  
are you skipping???

**fuyu-chan**  
14:14  
IT’S DAY ONE

Natsumi waits. (Gohon-me.) Peko’s phone pings in the open locker next to her. It barely even took him one full minute.

**me**  
14:15  
(Person Raising Both Hands In Celebration ≊ Person Raising Hands)

**me**  
14:15  
peko’s skipping too btw don’t even bother

**me**  
14:16  
literally nobody cares about this except you

(Roppon-me.) 

At first she thinks he’s started ignoring her after that, but then Peko’s phone pings again. Natsumi counts backwards from twenty in her head, and gets to three.

**fuyu-chan**  
14:19  
goddammit quit dragging her into your bullshit

**fuyu-chan**  
14:19  
and stop snooping around her phone

**me**  
14:20  
maybe you shouldn’t be texting her while you’re in class!!

**me**  
14:20  
that’s so disrespectful to the teacher fuyu-chan (Disappointed Face )

(Nanahon-me.)

He really does start ignoring her after that. (She sends three more messages, with as many combinations of the heart emojis as she can manage.) One of the downsides of them not going to the same school anymore: she doesn’t get to appreciate how red his face gets when he’s trying not to throw his phone across the room.

It’s Peko’s final set of forms. She finishes with her partner, sword sheathed with no flourish or flash, and bows deeply. All those repetitions and she’s barely even broken a sweat; her partner tries to hide the way her breath heaves in and out, and fails miserably.

“I am finished, young mistress,” Peko says, when she comes back over. “Thank you for waiting.”

Natsumi doesn’t bother looking up from her phone. She watches because it's important for her to, not because it’s some imposition; Peko knows that just as well as she does. “So? How’re the new digs? Is it everything the website said it would be?”

“The facilities are even more extensive than I expected,” Peko admits. She’d brought all of her equipment with her, but today the only things she hadn’t swapped out were her shinai and her sword bag. Natsumi knows because it had all been shiny and slightly too big, not at all like Peko’s broken-in and battered equipment from home. “I’m grateful for everything your family has provided—”

“Whatever,” Natsumi says. She flips her phone back against her palm and leans her chin on her hand. “If you see something you like better, tell me and I’ll get Dad to buy it for you. He doesn’t get to skimp just because he feels like it.” 

“Thank you, young mistress.” Peko reaches into the locker for her change of clothes; she balances her phone on top of the pile, its notification light still blinking. “Did something happen?”

“It’s my brother,” Natsumi tells her, while she scrolls through the messages. “We’re gonna need to chat with him in a couple days. He’s getting something ready for me.”

“He says we shouldn’t be skipping class,” Peko says. “In mostly capital letters.”

“Oh, yeah. That too.”

“Should we attend class tomorrow?”

Natsumi laughs. “Me? No way. I’m not spending my morning watching some old guy sweat out his hangover. You?” She shrugs. “It can’t hurt, I guess. You can go if you want to. _I_ think it’d be a waste of your time, but whatever. I’ll tell you if there’s ever a day you definitely need to skip.”

“Yes, young mistress.”

*

Fuyuhiko doesn’t respond to her until the weekend. He’s just being a baby; she knows it doesn’t take him that long to crunch a few numbers. He does it faster than she does, which is why she even asks him to do it in the first place. 

She video calls him from her dorm room before dinner, while Peko sits on the bed to wait. 

“Still with the fucking emoji code?” he says when he answers. “What are you, eleven?”

“Hi, Fuyu-chan.” He glowers, and she grins. “Did you get what I asked for or not?”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it.” Fuyuhiko waves a manila folder at the camera. “I’ll have somebody bring it to you. What do you even need these numbers for?”

“I want to see how we measure up in Europe,” Natsumi says. “I think I can open up some contracts.”

“Europe?” He lays the folder flat out on his desk, and flips to one of the center pages. The aluminum crackle of the bag of karinto under his left hand isn’t friendly to her computer’s speakers.

“How many bags of those have you had today?” she asks.

“Shut up.” He snaps the next piece noisily between his teeth. “It’s pretty pathetic out there. You’d have to get a lot more to make it worth anything. Maybe find someone other than those Nagahara dumbasses to make the shipments. The only reason Mom didn’t roll them after the last one they lost was because it was barely worth anything anyway.”

The shipments. She hadn’t thought of that. It’ll set all her still-forming plans back by at least six months if she can’t find a decent way around it, maybe even squash them before she has a chance to get them any further than that. The whole point was to expand into the region by securing more lucrative contracts, but if the goods go missing between here and there, they’re even more dead in the water than they were already.

“That’s fine,” she says anyway. “I’m Ultimate, aren’t I?”

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, according to somebody. Still a dumb as fuck thing to call it, if you ask me.” He ducks out of view of the camera, and Natsumi knows he’s rifling in the bottom drawer of his desk for more karinto. “What’s that place like, anyway? Are the toilets made out of solid gold or what?”

“They might as well be. There’s a kid in my class whose real talent is dumping the perfect log, I think. Ultimate Actual Shitter.” 

“Fucking gross. I didn’t need to hear that.”

“Well, I had to, so now you have to.” She waits until he starts fidgeting with the packaging of his snack, and then tilts her head to talk back over her shoulder. “Oh! Plus, Peko’s got a bunch of cool new stuff to try out. Right, Peko?”

Fuyuhiko says, “Peko’s there?” behind her, his voice tinny over the speakers.

“Did you bring any of it back with you, Peko?” Natsumi says over him. “I bet Fuyuhiko’s dying to see it.”

“No,” Peko says. Natsumi nudges the edge of her laptop to put her in better view of the camera. “The equipment is intended for all the athletes. It wouldn’t be fair to keep it to myself. I’m sorry, Fuyuhiko-sama.”

He fumbles. Natsumi could set everything up perfectly for him, and he’d still find a way to mess it up. “No, that’s not— Seriously, don’t worry about it.”

“That’s okay,” Natsumi says, “I’ll take a picture next time!” She leans her chair back as far as it will go, and frames Peko and her laptop between her fingers. “Ka-chk. It’ll be just like you were here too, Fuyu-chan.”

“Yeah, hard fuckin’ pass on that one.”

Natsumi describes it instead, the way Peko has already worn through three training volunteers without even trying, until the bells ring to tell them they’re late for dinner.

*

For two months, everything is fine. Her teacher gets more and more useless every day, and her classmates stay out of her way, which gives her all the time she needs to do what she needs to do. She opens eleven more weapons contracts in France, Belgium, and Italy, with a twelfth in the pipeline. 

All of them are conditional on her having a better and more reliable shipment team within the next six months, but that’s fine. She can find the contracts, and she can find the shipments.

Natsumi texts her brother a time and an address while she waits for Peko to change and start her forms. The deal is too big to lose, but too small for her to go herself; sending Fuyuhiko lets them feel good about themselves, but reminds them that they aren’t good enough yet to see the heir in person, much less the boss.

The door to the dojo creaks open. The woman who steps in is too old to be a student, but she’s not any faculty worth knowing. Natsumi ignores her. “Kuzuryuu-san.” She doesn’t look up. “Kuzuryuu-san, did you know class has started?”

“That’s a laugh,” Natsumi says, and she does laugh, for good measure. “Calling that garbage ‘class.’ I think I might actually get dumber the longer I spend in there.”

“Ah. Sorry, maybe I misspoke! What I meant was—” Natsumi doesn’t know how a teacher managed to get reflexes like that, but next she knows she has a faceful of ginger ponytail, and her phone isn’t in her hand anymore. “Kuzuryuu-san, it’s time for class.”

Natsumi swipes her hand out, but the teacher ducks back out of her reach. It’s the most anyone has crossed her since the very first day, and Natsumi nearly has to sit on her hands to keep herself from leaping off the bench. She grits her teeth, says instead, “Take it up with Kizakura. Or maybe all of _your_ students dropped out already?”

“I’m Yukizome Chisa,” the teacher says. She smiles, bland and placid, like she isn’t holding Natsumi’s phone hostage. “I’m your new homeroom teacher.” Her eyes lift past Natsumi’s shoulder. “Pekoyama-san, I hope you’ll come with us as well.”

Natsumi looks; Peko is just a few steps behind her, her shinai half-drawn. She doesn’t answer, only looks to Natsumi for instruction, and Natsumi jerks her head.

Yukizome has the air of one of those starry-eyed schmucks in their first teaching job, determined to motivate everyone into holding hands and doing their homework. She’s not the half-drunk limp noodle Kizakura is, but it isn’t like taking care of her is going to be hard.

“Yukizome-sensei, huh?” Natsumi drapes both arms over her knees and meets Yukizome’s persistent pleasantness with a saccharine drawl of her own. “You’ve got a lot to learn. Me and Peko-chan are like peas in a pod, you know? Even Kizakura knows that.” Peko falls into place behind her, silent reinforcement. “And _I’m_ not going anywhere.”

Her phone buzzes in Yukizome’s hand. That’s her brother, probably complaining about how far away the meeting place is. “I understand,” Yukizome says. “What if I made you a deal?”

“A deal?” Natsumi repeats, “Is this a joke? What’re _you_ gonna offer _me,_ my phone back?” She flicks her wrist; she’s done with this stupid conversation. Peko ducks to start collecting their things from the lockers. “Whatever. Keep it. Read my texts if you want. I’ve got better things to do.” 

Yukizome doesn’t read the message; she doesn’t even look to see who it’s from. “You come to class with me today,” she goes on, “And I’ll owe you one favor. Anything, no questions asked.”

Natsumi laughs in her face. “It _is_ a joke! Are you hearing this, Peko-chan? Keep at it, Yukizome-sensei, you’re already miles ahead of Kizakura.” Peko’s ready; Natsumi can feel her waiting for what to do next. She stands up, both hands on her hips. “What am I supposed to get out of that? Somebody to make my bed for me?”

Yukizome considers the ceiling. “Well, you could if you wanted,” she says. “But I was thinking more along the lines of… Access to school security and surveillance footage? Faculty contact information? Performance and disciplinary records?”

She lists them on her fingers, one by one, like they’re items on a grocery list instead of potential breaches of her contract. Natsumi looks her in the face and still can’t decide if she’s stupid, bluffing, or ballsy.

“Please,” she says, “You don’t have access to any of that.”

Yukizome’s smile doesn’t flicker. “That doesn’t mean I can’t get it,” she says. “Just remember! It’s only one, Kuzuryuu-san. That’s the deal.”

As far as Natsumi can tell, there’s no downside. She suffers through one class, and if Yukizome is telling the truth, she has an ace in her pocket. If she isn’t, then Natsumi can break her fingers later for her practical exam. “Yeah? And what’re _you_ getting out of this?”

“You’re my student,” Yukizome says, like it’s obvious. “It’s my job to help you accomplish your goals.” She holds the phone out, an offer. “So, will you come to class this morning?”

“One class,” Natsumi says.

“One class,” Yukizome agrees.

Natsumi snatches her phone back.

*

There are six other students already waiting outside the dojo. Sonia beams when Natsumi and Peko follow Yukizome out; the others groan all at once.

“There was a betting pool on whether or not you’d agree to Yukizome-sensei’s terms,” Sonia explains on the way to pick up Komaeda. “None of the others thought you would.” She pulls a small wad of yen from the front pocket of her uniform. “I have just ‘made bank’!”

“That was a stupid bet,” Natsumi tells her. “I almost said no.”

Sonia only smiles. “Admittedly, I did not know the details,” she says. “But a good leader will do something unpleasant if it benefits the people who follow her, yes?”

Natsumi’s phone buzzes again. She shrugs Sonia off, and tells Fuyuhiko to suck it up.


	2. Chapter 2

One class turns into three, and then five. Natsumi still thinks she got the better end of the deal, but she has to hand it to Yukizome: the classes aren’t terrible. They’re still useless, but at least they aren’t boring. 

One day Souda and Nanami push all the desks to the sides of the room so that they can set up a video game tournament, and the whole class gets riled up over some stupid game where cartoon characters fight each other. Natsumi lingers in the back with Peko, and watches Nanami wipe the floor with them round after round after round.

“Kuzuryuu-san.” She’s texting when Nanami turns around in her seat. When she looks up, Nanami has one of the controllers held out toward her. “Do you want to play this round?”

Souda mutters, “What, seriously? Her? But she’s—” and Natsumi throws him a glare that makes him choke on the rest of it.

“What? Are you boring yourselves already?” Nanami smiles when she snatches the controller from her hand. “Fine, fine. Give it here. I’ll show you how it’s done.”

“So…. That means we need two more players.” Nanami looks up at the rest of the room. Natsumi focuses on selecting a character. She can’t decide between the pink blobby thing and the one that looks like a giant, ugly dragon. “Who else wants to play?”

The room meets her with silence.

Peko makes to step forward, but Natsumi pins her back to her place against the wall with a look. Having her be the only one to volunteer would be worse than no one volunteering at all.

She can feel Nanami looking at her.

“Well,” she says, “We could play one-on-one, but….”

“What the hell! You guys are holdin’ up the game!” Owari shoulders through the crowd and falls cross-legged onto the cushion next to Natsumi. “Gimme that, I’ll play again.”

“Then I shall play as well!” Sonia descends onto the last empty seat, and pushes her sleeves up to her elbows. “Be prepared, everyone— this game is about to ‘get lit’!”

Natsumi ends up picking the pink blob.

Owari _decimates_ her.

“Bullshit!” she shouts, the fourth time Owari’s character flings hers off the screen. The rest of the class has crowded the TV to watch; someone in the back whistles as her blob flies into the distance and disappears. “That move is cheap and you know it!”

“It’s actually a pretty sophisticated technique,” Nanami says. Her fingers don’t break rhythm on the buttons as she talks; she’s ahead of all of them by at least three lives. “It’s difficult to control, but once you master it, it’s extremely powerful and reliable.”

“Shut up!”

“Hear that, Kuzuryuu? I’m a _master._ ” Owari elbows into her space, and Natsumi elbows back. At this point she may as well be smashing her entire hand against all the buttons, for all the good they’re doing her. “Now c’mere so I can knock you out of this once and for all!”

“Shut up!”

“Do not feel bad, Kuzuryuu-san,” Sonia says. “I was eliminated ages ago. At the very least, you will get third place!”

“ _Shut up!_ ”

It doesn’t last long at all. Her blob has barely respawned before it’s being flung again to the other side of the map, and all it takes is a few fumbled button presses for her last life to go down the drain. 

Owari whoops. Natsumi throws her controller on the ground. The rest of the class leans away from the TV to wait for the round to finish; anyone versus Nanami is interesting to nobody.

“Aw, man.”

“What, were you seriously rooting for Natsumi?”

“I mean, kinda, yeah. She’s totally right about that move, it’s a frickin’ nightmare.”

“Can we kick this dumb-dumb out yet? I’m getting sick and tired of her always winning. She’s just pressing the same buttons over and over again!”

“She’s _not_ winning, though.”

“Losing to Chiaki-chan basically _is_ winning to the rest of us!”

“Let us play one more round. A ‘redemption round,’ if you will,” Sonia says, after Nanami has beaten Owari into a pulp, and the final tally screen is up to tell them how much worse they are in comparison. “Kuzuryuu-san and myself versus Nanami-san and Owari-san, for honor!”

Nanami starts to say something about rotating classmates and giving others fair turns, but Owari drowns her out. “You’re on!” she crows, and bullies her way over to swap seats with Sonia. “You and me, Nanami, let’s do this!”

Sonia settles into the seat next to Natsumi, and offers her discarded controller back. “What do you say, Kuzuryuu-san? Shall we teach them who is ‘boss’ and who is not? A true ‘Coming Back Special’!”

Natsumi rolls her eyes. “Jeez, if you’re gonna talk like that, you might as well not talk, Sonia-san.” She snatches the controller, and their classmates swoop in to crowd the TV again. “I just want to get this idiot to shut up.” 

“Eat it, Kuzuryuu! You’re goin’ down!”

It goes about as well as any of them expected.

*

The irony of going to class on a daily basis is that now she has to do all her actual work on her own time. But the plan is simple enough, once she puts all the pieces together. It might be basic, but that’s only because she perfected the strategy years ago, and it hasn’t let her down since. She knows what she does, and she does it well.

She lays it out for Fuyuhiko the next time they talk, step by step.

“‘Novoselic’?” he echoes, when she’s finished. “Bullshit. That’s not a real place.”

“If things didn’t exist just because _you_ didn’t know about them, then Aunt Miyū was a ghost until last year.“

“Will you give that a fucking rest already?”

“Look it up!”

“I _am_ looking it up.”

She sits through watching him search for all the info she knows already. (She drums her nails against the body of her laptop when it takes too long. He snaps, “Cut it out,” and she starts tapping the microphone directly instead.) The fourth time he sighs like the computer is a personal imposition on him, she gives up.

“What’s your problem now?”

“I can’t find it on the goddamn map is the problem!”

Natsumi groans into her hands. “No, stupid, that’s the _point._ ” The distance is such a massive pain in the ass; this would be so much easier if he were just here with her. “Whatever! Look it up on your own time. Just listen to me. The country is miniscule, okay? Like, beyond tiny. Most people don’t even know it exists, and most map makers just totally skip over it. But their military is _loaded_. Every single person learns how to use military-grade weapons as a regular part of school.”

She watches for his reaction, but he’s focused on another page on his computer. She reaches for the folder on the shelf above her head, the one with all her notes and printouts. He hasn’t interrupted her yet, and she doesn’t intend to give him the chance.

“Think about it. Who’s going to notice if there’s a few extra crates of handguns going through a place like that? If we had a _waypoint_ for Europe, we can ship directly from there. Cut down on the trip for anything coming in or out. Man it with our own people.“

“And if there’s a monarchy to validate it,” Fuyuhiko finishes, “who’s going to think twice about it?” He must have switched back to the video chat, because he focuses again on the camera. “You think you got an in with the princess?”

“All politicians are the same,” Natsumi says. “Whether they’re a princess or some greasy local stooge. They all want the same things. They’re all afraid of the same things.” She leans back in her chair. “I can get her to say yes.”

“If you say so.” He squints down and to the right— at his desk, or maybe his phone— and then he says, “By the way. Niijima’s old lady’s in the hospital again.”

Natsumi hums. “How many times is that?”

“Three. He’s a fuckin’ mess, you should’ve seen him in here earlier. Couldn’t keep anything straight. I don’t think he’s slept in days.”

She can hear it in his voice. He’s fishing, trying to wheedle something out of her. It’s never worked; she doesn’t know why he still tries. “Spit it out already. What are you trying to say?”

He bristles. “I’m _saying_ maybe it’s about time we take Niijima off that route. Let one of the other three take point. They can handle it.”

“What for? His mom isn’t the one making the drops, is she?”

“Shut up. I’m being serious,” he says. She resists the urge to roll her eyes. “He’s going to fuck it up for the rest of them if he goes. I was surprised he figured out how to tie his shoes this morning. If it’s not this drop, it’ll be another one.”

“ _I’m_ being serious too,” she snaps. “We’re not running a charity. He’s been slipping for months, he needs to start earning his keep. If he can’t do that, he’s gonna have to deal with the consequences.”

Fuyuhiko glares somewhere past the camera. He’s gritting his teeth when he says, “Fine.”

“If somebody fucks up, tell me.” Natsumi gathers her papers back together in a pile. “Until then, I’ve gotta focus on this.”

“Fine,” he says again, clipped. “I gotta go.”

The screen goes blank, and Natsumi doesn’t resist the urge this time.

*

As it turns out, Sonia’s schedule is easy to tap into. She usually eats lunch either in a huddle with some of the other girls in their class, or with Tanaka. It makes getting her alone annoying, but not impossible: Tanaka is always late to lunch (he insists on visiting his animals first, every single day) and Koizumi is the lynchpin of her little entourage. There are days when she goes somewhere else for lunch, and on those days the rest of them take ages to get their act together.

All Natsumi has to do is show up.

It’s a few minutes before lunch on a Tuesday, and Natsumi lets her tray clatter against the table where Sonia is reading. She doesn’t jump or flinch; she just looks up, one finger gently against the inner spine of her book to keep her place. “Sonia-san! Mind if me and Peko-chan sit here today?”

Natsumi’s already sitting by the time Sonia gets through saying, “No, not at all. There is plenty of room for the both of you.” Peko slides onto the bench next to her, and Sonia smiles up at her, too. “Good afternoon, Pekoyama-san.”

Peko only nods.

Sonia doesn’t seem bothered. She sets her book aside, picture perfect politeness. “I must admit, I am a little surprised,” she says. “I thought you and Pekoyama-san preferred to eat together just the two of you.”

Natsumi shrugs. “Yukizome-sensei says we should be ‘branching out.’” She manages half air-quotes, one handed. “So, we thought, why not, you know? Not all of you are completely terrible, I guess.”

“Well, I am honored to be the first,” Sonia says, and she really does seem it, chest puffed up and shoulders straight. “But I think you will find that everyone is very agreeable, if you give them a chance.”

Natsumi eats instead of answering. She tries not to let her curiosity get the better of her, but she can’t help it; she doesn’t actually know where Koizumi goes, on days like this. “Speaking of _everyone,_ ” she says, swallowing, “where the heck are they today? Don’t you normally eat with Koizumi-san and her little friends?”

“Ah. On Tuesdays and Thursdays Koizumi-san goes to the West building to eat lunch with a friend of hers in the Reserve Course. Sometimes the others are… delayed, in her absence.”

A friend in the Reserve Course. Peko looks at her, but Natsumi only bobs her head. “Ohhh, I get it. That’s how it is, huh.”

Sonia is quiet for a moment. She hasn’t started to eat yet, but she fidgets with her chopsticks. “Forgive me for saying so, Kuzuryuu-san, but I cannot help but notice… there is a certain amount of animosity between the two of you, is there not?”

Natsumi focuses on stirring her food. “With who, Koizumi-san? Pfft.” Her chopsticks clatter around the edges of her bowl. “That’s all in good fun, you know? We went to middle school together.”

“I see. With you and Pekoyama-san?”

“No,” Peko says. She doesn’t say anything else. Sonia looks at Natsumi instead.

“Me and Peko-chan didn’t go to the same school then,” Natsumi fills in. “We were home schooled for a while, but after that my parents decided to send me to a regular middle school.”

“Fascinating! I myself had never attended a quote _normal_ unquote school before Hope’s Peak Academy.” Sonia doesn’t even attempt the air-quotes. “Did you find it difficult to acclimate to the change?”

Natsumi remembers the first day of middle school, how it had been the first time she could remember without Peko behind her left shoulder. Her teacher had been spineless, and the other girls in her class had gotten upset when he let her cut class and talk back without so much as a reprimand. None of them had known to watch their step or their mouths, not at first.

(She’d learned how to teach them the lesson on her own.)

“Nah,” she says. “It was a breeze.”

“Oh.” Sonia looks down at her tray. Natsumi slurps her lunch and lets her stew. “I must admit… I am having more difficulty acclimating than I anticipated, myself. There is so much I do not know already, and some days I feel I may never catch up. Perhaps if I had started in the school system earlier, I would not be having as much trouble as I am now.”

Natsumi doesn’t look at her. She eats, and thinks about her middle school teacher, white faced and stammering. “You can tell yourself that if you want, but that’s not how it works,” she says. “You could’ve gone to preschool if you wanted and it would’ve been the same. Probably worse. You should be glad you started out here.”

“How so?”

“You’re a princess. Out there, that’s all you are.” She shrugs. “At least in here it’s the same for most of us. You don’t have to try so hard when everybody else is just as weird as you.”

“I see.” Sonia smiles. “I believe I understand. Thank you for the advice, Kuzuryuu-san. I wonder—”

Peko’s phone buzzes on the table. She lays her hand over it to quiet it, and it buzzes again. She pulls it into her lap instead. “Apologies. I did not mean to interrupt.”

“Oh, no, no need to worry, Pekoyama-san—”

Natsumi cranes her neck over to peer at the screen. “Who’s that?”

“Fuyuhiko-sama,” Peko answers. “Would you like to hear the message, young mistress?”

“Pass,” Natsumi says. She grins around her chopsticks. “He can text whatever he wants. I’m not his babysitter.”

Sonia pats her mouth between bites with a cloth napkin. Natsumi doesn’t even know where she found a cloth napkin. “Is that a member of your organization, Kuzuryuu-san?”

“My little brother.”

Sonia inhales sharply. Her napkin gets crushed in her fist. “Brother! I see.” She scans the dining hall: left, then right, then back over her shoulder. Then she leans in on both elbows, her voice low and expression intense. “Kuzuryuu-san. May I ask you a personal question?”

Natsumi chews. “I guess.”

“I have watched a great many television dramas that delve into the life and culture of the yakuza in modern day Japan. There is always a great struggle for power, rife with deceit and violence and betrayal. It is most dramatic!” She’s talking so fast Natsumi can barely keep up, and she’s leaning so far across the table her hair might fall in her food if she weren’t a princess. “Tell me, did you struggle within your family to achieve the position you have now?”

Natsumi has to screw her face up to keep from laughing. “I beat my brother at being born, I guess. And I usually beat him at pachinko, does that count?”

Sonia’s face falls. “I see.” She settles back in her seat, and pokes at the remaining rice in her bowl. “I know this is an improper thing to say, but… I must admit to some disappointment.”

“You shouldn’t watch trash like that,” Natsumi tells her. “I can guarantee I have at least five stories that are _way_ better than anything else you’ve watched.”

“Really?!” Sonia grips the edge of the table with both hands. She nearly bounces in her seat. “Please do share! I would be fascinated to hear of your experiences, Kuzuryuu-san.”

Natsumi starts with the time she and Peko had been kidnapped and stranded in the mountains, and Sonia hangs on every word.

*

They eat together every Tuesday after that. It turns out to not be unbearable; Sonia is simultaneously everything Natsumi understands a princess to be, and everything she understands a princess to _not_ be. She tells Natsumi about Novoselic’s labyrinthine traditions, and Natsumi tells her about the last fist fight that broke out in one of her family’s casinos.

It’s going well— which, Natsumi reminds herself, is all that matters.

Sonia leans across the gap between their desks one day, during afternoon homeroom. “Will you and Pekoyama-san be going to the dojo again after class today?”

“Probably! Peko-chan’s gotta get those reps in.” Natsumi tips her head back. “Right, Peko-chan?”

“Yes.” 

“Why? You wanna come watch?”

“Well… yes and no,” Sonia says. “I have ‘reps’ of my own I must get in, actually. I have read that while most modern yakuza do not carry firearms on their person, many are still trained in their use, especially those in senior positions. Is that accurate to your experience, Kuzuryuu-san?”

“I know how to shoot,” Natsumi says.

(She’d gotten her first gun on her thirteenth birthday, a slim white revolver with gold plating around the chamber. Her father had taken her out to the compound’s practice range that same day; he’d knelt with her and shown her how to hold it, how to stand, how to bend her elbows just enough to absorb the force of the shot.

“Be patient, but don’t hesitate,” he’d said, big hands on both her shoulders. “When you have your target, take it.” 

She’d screamed the first time she pulled the trigger. The gun had jumped in her hands, sudden and hot and violent, and her arms had ached all over afterwards, like she’d just spent an hour doing handstands. Her father had made her take the shot again, over and over, until she learned not to be afraid.)

“Excellent!” Sonia is delighted in a way only a princess can be, hands clasping instead of clapping. “I am afraid that since arriving in Japan I have been inexcusably lazy in practicing my marksmanship. I was hoping you might want to practice with me, Kuzuryuu-san.”

“You want to have a shootout,” Natsumi repeats. “With me?”

“‘Hells’ yes! It would be a fascinating comparison of our relative skillsets, do you not agree? Plus I believe it would be a— ‘bomb-ass’ good time!” 

It’s been months since Natsumi practiced last, too. Students are allowed to bring whatever tools they consider necessary to furthering their talent, including personal weapons, but Natsumi had left her revolver at home when she left for school. (“There’s no need for her to carry another weapon when she already has one with her,” her father had said.)

“Okay,” she says, and Sonia’s face lights up. “But if I win, you never get to say ‘bomb-ass’ again.”

“And if I win, I may say ‘bomb-ass’ as many times as I like from now on without complaint. Agreed?”

Natsumi clasps her hand. “Done.”

When class lets out, they have to detour to the weapons cages; the school keeps practice weapons of all kinds in the dojo, but unlimited access is restricted only to students whose talents require the use of them. Any other students require approval

Sonia marches straight up to the supervisor without a single inch of guile or hesitation. “Hello. My name is Sonia Nevermind, and my associate is Kuzuryuu Natsumi.” She bends into a shallow, formal bow. “We would like to borrow two firearms for practice purposes, please.”

The supervisor is a skinny senior with glasses, a student volunteer. He references a small tablet behind his desk. “The Ultimate Yakuza—” Natsumi smiles at him from over Sonia’s shoulder. He can’t look at her for longer than a second or two. “And, uh, the Ultimate Princess.” He frowns. “Is markmanship really part of your curriculum?”

“We are young women poised to become proud and powerful leaders in our respective societies,” Sonia tells him, grave and, Natsumi thinks, entirely serious. “How would this _not_ be part of our curriculum?”

“I— I mean, I guess, but the weapons are really intended for the athletes…”

Natsumi lays her palm flat on the counter. “Gee, Sonia-san, it almost sounds like this guy is trying to tell us what our talents are for,” she says. “But that can’t be right. I mean, they’re _our_ talents, right?” She tilts her head at him. “What would he know about it?”

“Right.” His adam’s apple bobs uncomfortably. “No, right. You’re right.” The door to the cage buzzes, and Sonia swings it open with a smile. “Just, uh, keep them in the shooting range, and make sure to sign them back in when you’re finished.”

Natsumi had only seen the cage containing the swords, knives, and other bladed weapons before, because that’s the cage Peko has access to. The firearms cage is a veritable arsenal; Natsumi steps back to snap a picture with her phone to send to Rin later.

She chooses a sleek, lightweight pistol, the closest equivalent she can find to her revolver. Sonia chooses a massive bolt-action battle rifle. “An excellent choice, Kuzuryuu-san!” she says, when she slings the wide strap over her shoulder. “It is truly ‘adorbs af.’ Here, you must not forget these, either.” She hangs a pair of brightly-colored ear muffs around Natsumi’s neck. “Safety is of the utmost importance.”

They take their positions at the far end of the shooting range. They must look out of place, still in school uniforms; some of the other students give them sidelong glances. Natsumi glowers back until they look away.

Sonia pounds her rifle against the floor. “These are the rules, should you choose to accept: you take a shot, and I must duplicate it. Then I take a shot, and you must duplicate mine. We go back and forth until one of us fails or we both run out of bullets.”

Natsumi cocks her pistol. She lifts both arms, elbows bent just enough, and sends a bullet straight into the heart of the target. “Okay,” she says. “You’re on.”

“Excellent.” Sonia hefts the butt of her rifle against her shoulder, and barely takes a moment to steady the barrel. Her shot flies straight down the center, a perfect match. “Now! How about a true challenge, hm?”

They go back and forth, shot for shot. Sonia throws plastic rings into the air and shoots through them. Natsumi ricochets her bullet off of the broad side of a training dummy. None of it is at the level of the Ultimate students the guns were actually intended for, but for once that doesn’t matter.

Sonia drops to her belly for her final shot, the body of her rifle flush against her cheek. She aims high, and when she pulls the trigger the bullet bounces off the top edge of the target and shatters just one of the clay pigeon targets in storage behind it.

“That’s garbage!” Natsumi shouts. Other students around them glare. “That was _all_ luck. No way that counts!”

“ _That_ is how we do in Novoselic, Kuzuryuu-san!” Sonia pumps her fist, her cheeks flushed. “Do you forfeit?”

Natsumi drops to the floor. “Hell no. What do I look like, huh?” 

Her bullet finds its target. Sonia nearly explodes with delight when it does, which for her boils down to shouting “Amazing!” when the pigeon shatters.

“It looks like we are at a draw,” Sonia says, when Natsumi is back on her feet. She bows, her fist over her heart. “Excellent shooting, Kuzuryuu-san. You are a formidable opponent!”

Natsumi doesn't bow in return. She rolls her eyes when Sonia isn't looking, instead. “Yeah, yeah. You’re not bad either, I guess.” 

They drop the guns back off together. (On the way they agree a draw means that Sonia can keep saying whatever she likes, and that Natsumi can keep complaining about it.) The skinny supervisor is still there, and his palms are sweating when Natsumi turns the pistol back over to him. The whole desk shudders when Sonia drops her rifle onto it. 

“What do you think, Kuzuryuu-san?” Sonia asks, on the way back. “Shall we have celebratory ‘frozen yo’ in wake of our competition?” 

“I need to wait for Peko-chan,” Natsumi answers. She's missed enough of Peko's training already. She doesn't need to sway Sonia enough to miss the rest of it, and froyo makes her stomach hurt, anyway.

Sonia doesn't seem offended. She only nods. “Yes. Of course. I shall leave you to it.” She dips into another, shallow bow. “Thank you for joining me, Kuzuryuu-san. It is always more enjoyable to practice with a partner. Perhaps we may practice again sometime?”

Natsumi could use the practice here and there, and she’s always liked target shooting besides. There’s no reason to say no. “Yeah, okay,” she says. “Why not?”

Sonia leaves, with a wave and a nearly literal spring in her step, and Natsumi slips back into the dojo. It's mostly emptied out by now, save for Peko, still pacing through her forms. She must have started them as a cooldown, but Natsumi came in too late to follow them from the beginning. Peko is moving sure-footed and fast; Natsumi can’t read the transitions.

Natsumi sits by the lockers to wait. (The notification light of Peko’s phone blinks from underneath her pile of clothes.) She watches for long minutes, but she still can’t find a seam between anything.

“Hey,” she says eventually, only because there’s no one else in the room. “Peko?”

Peko doesn’t acknowledge her out loud, but her head does tilt in her direction. Her movements get longer and slower, until Natsumi recognizes the form in its final stage. (Gohon-me.)

Natsumi nods, and pulls out her phone to start tapping through her texts. Peko’s pace swings up back to normal.

*

There are times when Yukizome disappears, for up to an hour at a time. It’s never when it counts— she’s always on time for class or after-school review sessions— but sometimes during lunch, or breaks, or before the school day starts, someone will look for her and not be able to find her.

(Hanamura had insisted that she was out having clandestine meetings with some faculty member from the Reserve Course, and Mioda had shouted for a while about how she was definitely, definitely a secret agent.)

What’s important is that 1-B is empty sometimes during lunch, and that she and Peko can have free rein of it if they feel like it. It’s quiet, and private, and closer than either of their dorm rooms if they need to talk during the day without anyone else shoving their nose in.

Also, Sonia keeps wanting to eat with them any time they’re in the dining hall, and it’s starting to get inconvenient.

Peko brings lunch. They turn the chairs around so they can sit together at the same desk, and she sets places for the both of them. “Have you decided on a time to make our proposal?” 

“No,” Natsumi says. “We’ve got a couple weeks. And I want to make sure we time it right.” There are two deadlines to think about: first, the deadline from the new contracts (of which there are now fourteen), and after that, the school’s practical exam. They’re close enough together that by the time the practical exam rolls around the deals will be finalized and polished, but recent enough for consideration. It’s a perfect arrangement.

She just has to get Sonia to say yes.

“We’re not going without a backup plan, either,” Natsumi goes on. “I’m not wasting a bunch of time doing damage control when she says no the first time.” She bends over the front of Yukizome’s desk and pops the drawer open. Yukizome had spent an entire class earlier in the week going over the practical exams: what to expect, how long they would have, where the judges were being selected from. It’d been the most bored Natsumi had been in weeks, but it also meant— “Here we go.” It’s buried under grading scales and flyers for student performances, but she finds it: one of the temporary student schedules for the exams. 

The schedule is still rough, but this close to the exams it must be in its final stages. Natsumi’s is tentatively scheduled for day three; Sonia’s is for day five. “Hmm.” Natsumi drums her fingers against the desk. “Hey, Peko. What d’you think a practical exam for a princess is like?”

Peko turns in her seat to answer, but before she can, Natsumi’s phone buzzes in her pocket. A few seconds later, so does Peko’s.

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:33  
niijima got picked up by the cops

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:33  
not gonna say I fucking told you so but

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:33  
I fucking told you so

Natsumi feels her stomach bottom out. The drops on that route had been going off without a hitch for months, even with all the things Fuyuhiko had said he was worried about. She types with one hand and tries not to crush the exam schedule in the other.

 **me**  
12:34  
are you kidding me? why are we even wasting money on the cops over there???

 **me**  
12:34  
what the FUCK happened

When she looks up, Peko is frowning down at her phone. “What?” Natsumi demands. “Did he tell you something about Niijima he didn’t tell me?”

“No,” Peko says, and dims her phone without responding to the message. “It’s— unrelated. What happened to Niijima-kun?”

“He’s a moron, that’s what happened to him.”

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:34  
turns out everyone else on that route has been covering for him

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:34  
on his own he’s a fucking mess

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:35  
the cops aren’t going to look the other way when he’s got the goods hanging out of his goddamn coat pocket like an amateur

She doesn’t have time for this. She wants to throw her phone or scream or make the drive all the way back to the compound just so she can punch them all in the jaw.

“Natsumi.”

Koizumi is watching her from the doorway. She has a lunch box hugged against her chest, wrapped in cute pink cloth with a rabbit design on it.

Peko stands, but Natsumi holds her hand up. (Peko doesn’t need to be told to hang back, but there’s no harm in letting Koizumi draw her own conclusions.) “Hi, Koizumi-san.” She mimes checking her phone. Fuyuhiko’s message glows back up at her, unanswered. “Wow, you’re late today, huh? Better hurry. If you keep disappointing Satou-san like this, she’ll never put in a good word for you with the Reserve Course.”

“Cut it out. What are you doing in here?”

Natsumi pulls herself up to sit on the edge of Yukizome’s desk. “Me? I dunno.” She flares the exam schedule in front of her face again. “Maybe I wanted to go somewhere quiet for lunch. Maybe I wanted to soak in all the good class memories. Maybe I wanted to ask Yukizome-sensei something.” She stares at Koizumi over the edge of the page. “Who says it’s any of your business?”

“I’m not going to just ignore it when you’re obviously up to something,” Koizumi snaps back. She grabs at the schedule, and nearly twists it out of Natsumi’s grip. “These are _our_ classmates. Is there seriously no one who’s off-limits to you?”

Natsumi slaps her hand away. Koizumi loses her grip on her lunch box, and it tumbles out of her arms; rice and cooked vegetables spill out when it cracks against the floor. The sound reverberates back out into the hall, but any students who care enough to peer inside turn their heads away when Natsumi glares back out at them. 

The silence is thick. “So what if there isn’t?” Natsumi says, just for the satisfaction of snapping it in two. She slaps what’s left of the temporary schedule back on Yukizome’s desk and leans into Koizumi’s space. “What are you gonna do about it?”

Koizumi turns her face away first. The room is silent again when she crouches to gather her lunch back up. “You know,” she says finally, “I used to think that you’d changed. That something must have happened to make you this way.” She reties the knot, even with the fabric lopsided and stained, and glares. “Now I understand. You just became the person you always were, deep down.”

“Good,” Natsumi says. “It’s about time you figured it out. We’re not in middle school anymore, you know? Who knows what would’ve happened if you didn’t?” She leans forward, and sunlight from the windows throws her shadow in a sharp line across the floor. She drops the airy lilt of her voice. “Try it again. See what happens.”

Koizumi doesn’t say anything else. She takes her lunch and leaves— but she’s not quick enough to keep Natsumi from seeing the way her confidence withers, the way her eyes get big and the tips of her fingers turn white when she clutches the box back against her chest. 

She thinks she walked out brave, but Koizumi always thinks she knows better than everyone else. She doesn’t know anything.

Natsumi leans back over to put the schedule back where she found it. “Peko.”

“Yes.”

“I changed my mind. We’re going to see Sonia tonight, after dinner. I’ve got what I need.”

“Yes, young mistress.”

Natsumi steps over what’s left of the mess of rice and vegetables on the floor, and taps out her response to Fuyuhiko.

 **me**  
12:42  
send someone to get him. make whatever deal they want

 **me**  
12:42  
i’ll handle him


	3. Chapter 3

They show up to Sonia’s dorm room late and unannounced, in the awkward hours between dinner and curfew. She’s still in her uniform when she answers the door, but she’s let her hair down to spill over her shoulders and past her knees. (She _would_ be the type to brush her hair five-hundred times every night, Natsumi thinks.)

Sonia swings the door open wide. “Kuzuryuu-san, Pekoyama-san! What a pleasant surprise. Please, come inside. I apologize that things are in such disarray, I was not expecting you.” 

_Disarray_ isn’t the word Natsumi would use. The room is neat, minimal, and organized, with the bed fully made and the closet sorted by color. Sonia keeps all her schoolbooks on one side of her shelf and a selection of fat, leather-bound tomes on the other, separated by a handful of slim magazines about fashion and animals. She’s left her hairbrush lying out on the bedspread.

“Nah,” Natsumi says. She draws one finger through the nonexistent dust on the desktop. “It’s _almost_ as pristine as Peko-chan’s room, even. What do you think, Peko-chan?”

Peko is giving the room a thorough once-over, but not, Natsumi knows, to check for cleanliness. “More than mine,” she answers. “I neglected to make the bed this morning.”

“You are being kind,” Sonia says. “But still, I am glad you think so. Please feel free to make yourselves comfortable.” She sits on her bed, and draws her hair over one shoulder to finish brushing it out. “What can I do for you this evening? Oh!” The springs in the mattress squeak when she bounces in place. “Perhaps a ‘binge’ television session, if you are feeling up to it? I have just discovered a new drama that I am dying to see more of, I believe you would very much enjoy it.”

“Maybe some other time,” Natsumi says. “I had a proposal for you, actually.”

Sonia’s brush hesitates in her hair. “A proposal,” she repeats. She draws the word out, until it starts to sound more like a question. “Of what kind, may I ask?”

Natsumi leans against the edge of the desk. Peko stands at her elbow, hands folded behind her back. “Business,” she says. “I mean, we’re pretty similar, you and me, right? I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us to help each other out, if you know what I mean. For the Kuzuryuu Clan to help out Novoselic?” She pauses, to make the rest sound tacked on: “And, you know, the other way around.”

Sonia goes quiet. Her nervous energy evaporates; she doesn’t bounce on the bed, or kick her feet. Instead, her shoulders roll back, her spine straightens out, and her smile fades into careful neutrality. 

She lays her brush back down on the bed beside her, and folds her hands in her lap. “It sounds as though you already have such a deal in mind. Is that the case?”

Natsumi recognizes the shift, because she’s done the same thing. It’s like putting on a coat, or a slim, tailored dress. It’s armor for a negotiation.

It had taken Sonia a while to catch on, but they’re on an even playing field now.

She doesn’t bother answering out loud. She holds her hand out, and Peko sets the folder with all her plans and percentages into her open palm. Natsumi lays it out onto Sonia’s desk behind her, and takes a step back.

Sonia doesn’t just stand from her bed; she _rises,_ a full-bodied, elegant thing, even in her school uniform. When she sits back down at the desk, it’s delicately, with her legs crossed at the ankle. Every inch of her is like a statue: perfect, proper, and cold.

She doesn’t say anything, and Natsumi doesn’t say anything, either. She just reads, page by page, cover to cover, while Natsumi waits behind her.

“You would like to make use of our barracks and weapons warehouses for temporary storage of goods coming in and out of Europe,” Sonia summarizes, when she’s finished. “Is that correct?”

“Pretty much,” Natsumi says. She counts terms on her fingers. “With the understanding that none of our shipments get touched by any of your people, only ours. We’ll take care of the… _delivery_ process, and none of our shipments will stay in one place longer than five days.” She closes her hand into a fist, and smiles at Sonia over it. “And the royal family of Novoselic gets a nice three percent cut of all the contracts, of course.”

Sonia gives a curt, “I see,” and turns back to her desk.

She thinks on it for a long time. She flips back through the folder to check and confirm some of Natsumi’s numbers, but for the most part she sits with her hands in her lap and her eyes closed, and just thinks. 

Natsumi lets her. This is the part that she’s always had trouble with, the part where you let them measure out their own rope. Patience has always had to be a learned thing, in their family. But she manages it, even if she has to dig her nails into her arms to get there.

Sonia closes the folder with one hand. “I am sorry, Kuzuryuu-san,” she says finally. “I believe Novoselic’s answer is no.”

It’s the answer Natsumi expected to get, at least at first. (She has to tell herself that a few times, when her stomach starts to swing anyway.) She lets the silence hang until it starts to coil in on itself, tense and painful, and then she tilts her head.

“No?”

Sonia slides the folder to the edge of her desk. Peko leans forward to retrieve it. “I appreciate the time you have taken in developing this partnership, but I do not believe I can accept under these terms.” 

“That’s fine. This is a negotiation, isn’t it?” Natsumi holds her hand out for the folder again. She flips it open when Peko gives it to her, even though she has everything in it memorized already. “What do you want? A bigger cut? Guaranteed protection for the warehouses?”

“It is not that,” Sonia says. “I see the benefit for my family. What I do not see is the benefit for my people.”

Natsumi pinches the bottom corner of one of the pages between her thumb and forefinger. Her stomach is swinging again, but this time she doesn’t have anything she can repeat in her head to get it to stop.

She has percentage ranges she’s willing to “bend” to after the first lowball numbers. She has options for different levels of protection and the price points for each. She has special perks lined up, vacations and fast cars and nice jewelry, provided and paid for under the table. All the things politicians always want. 

Her voice sticks in her throat, and she turns it into a scratchy laugh. “It never hurts the people to have some extra money in the coffers, does it?”

Sonia shakes her head once. It’s a crisp, decisive motion. “Novoselic’s economy is robust on its own. Diluting it with foreign money obtained extralegally would be disingenuous and deceptive to my people.” She hesitates. The princess mask cracks around her eyes, just enough for Natsumi to see the pity in them. “I am sorry,” she says again. “But I cannot agree.”

It’s fine. There are always options; the Kuzuryuus don’t end their negotiations at price points and moral high grounds. Sonia’s pointing her pity in the wrong direction, and if she’s cracking this early in the game, all it does is give Natsumi more of the upper hand.

Natsumi turns her face away. Her jaw is locking up in a way that makes the smile hard to hold, so she puffs air into her cheeks instead and lets it all out in a rush. “Well! That’s disappointing. You’re sure there’s nothing I can do to change your mind?”

“I am afraid not. I appreciate your understanding in this matter.”

“Sure, sure.” Natsumi drags her eyes away from the wall. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Sonia is smiling when she says, “Yes.” 

Somewhere between her ‘no’ and now, the princess had completely melted away. Sonia’s just herself now, without any of her edges or iron defenses. Like she really thinks the conversation ended there, like there’s no threat left she can see.

Natsumi hates it.

“Anyway,” she says, “if you do change your mind, you know where to find me.” She glances over her shoulder. “Come on, Peko-chan.”

Peko bows her head, and steps past her to hold the door open. 

“Kuzuryuu-san.”

Natsumi hovers in the doorway.

“I hope you will consider watching this new drama with me, at a later time,” Sonia says. She’s still smiling, even if it’s muted. “I will be sure to provide the popcorn, if so.”

“Yeah,” Natsumi says, despite herself. “Okay.”

*

The solution isn’t even that hard to find. There are eleven people on the Academy’s payroll with outstanding loans provided by her family; Natsumi gives Peko a list of their names and free rein to get information however she sees fit.

“If any of them ask,” Natsumi tells her, “you speak for me. If they’ve got a problem with _that,_ you do what you have to do.”

Peko understands it. It’s these sniveling idiots who don’t, the ones who assume she’s just another underling Natsumi’s father pays to follow her around. How many of them have to be made examples of before the rest of them get it is up to them.

Peko goes. Natsumi sees her twice a day every day for status updates, first thing in the morning and last thing before bed, but beyond that her schedule is erratic. She skips breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She shows up late to some classes, and not at all to the rest. She’s on time once, but with her uniform tie missing and the left sleeve of her shirt torn at the elbow, and she leaves again halfway through. 

Yukizome always frowns at Natsumi on the days Peko’s desk is still empty by the end of class, but she never asks. Which is good, because neither of them owe her an explanation for anything.

(Sonia does ask, once, during lunch. “Peko-chan’s got a lot of practicing to do,” Natsumi tells her in-between bites. “Practical exams coming up, you know?”) 

Natsumi spends the time dealing with the situation at home. Fuyuhiko manages to pull Niijima out from under the cops, but it takes a lot of money and a lot of promises to do it. With Peko busy and Fuyuhiko already peeved at her, Natsumi has to get one of the junior members to send her message for her.

Maybe the next time Niijima looks down to decide what to do with the goods in his hands, he’ll spend a little more time thinking about it.

**fuyu-chan**  
13:11  
it’s done

**me**  
13:11  
good. keep an eye on him the next couple days, i don’t want him fucking anything else up

**fuyu-chan**  
13:11  
was already

Natsumi drops the phone on her bed and leans back against the pillows to rub the heels of her hands against her eyes. It’s handled. She doesn’t want to bother with it anymore.

A few minutes later, her phone buzzes again.

**fuyu-chan**  
13:23  
peko’s dodging my texts. what are you doing?

**me**  
13:23  
she’s working. leave her alone

**fuyu-chan**  
13:23  
for a whole fucking week? what do you even have her doing?

Peko’s the only one who _can_ do it. She’s the only one worth trusting with something so important, and she’s the only one who knows enough to anticipate what Natsumi needs without being told. She’ll get it done, and she’ll do it quietly, she’ll do it fast, and she’ll do it right.

Natsumi ignores the message. There’s no point explaining it; he doesn’t understand. He’s never even tried to.

**fuyu-chan**  
13:29  
dammit she’s not there just to clean up after you

**fuyu-chan**  
13:29  
she’s got her own shit to deal with

He thinks he’s helping, but he isn’t.

Natsumi dumps her phone into her bag, and goes to class. Peko doesn’t show up that day, either.

*

It takes her just over two weeks to finish the job. On the last day, Natsumi finds her waiting in one of the more lightly-trafficked hallways before afternoon homeroom. She hadn’t texted or called ahead; she’s just there, and she falls right back into step behind her like she’d never been gone. 

Natsumi glances over her shoulder. “Did you get it?”

Peko nods. 

“All right. Hang on to it. We’re both making an appearance in class today. We’ll talk in my room after.”

“Yes, young mistress.”

Yukizome nearly trips over her desk coming up to greet them when they walk in. “Pekoyama-san! It’s good to see you. We missed you in class this morning.”

“I apologize,” Peko says. She pauses to bow. “I was otherwise engaged. My attendance should improve from this point forward.”

“Don’t worry, I think everyone here understands what that’s like. We’re just glad to have you back. Right, class?”

Natsumi slouches low in her seat. She tries to focus on Yukizome’s lecture, if just to make the time go faster, but it sounds more to her like snatches of white noise, bouncing around the inside of her skull. She feels nauseous and jittery; both of her knees knock repeatedly against the bottom of her desk. She counts every second on the wall clock over the door.

When it’s over, Sonia catches her by the arm to ask her if she’d like to go for a run after class. Natsumi looks her in the eye and smiles when she lies about having other plans.

She had expected information, or receipts, or a hearsay story she’d have to give substance to, but none of that does Peko credit. When they get back to the dorm, what she pulls out from the interior pocket of her bag is a new, unmarked disc.

“Satoya Ryou.” Peko sets her own laptop on the desk and loads the disc into it. “He is the homeroom teacher for class 75-A. He has also been filming students in restricted areas without their knowledge for the past eight months, using equipment purchased with funds provided by the Kuzuryuu Clan.” The video loads. The thumbnail alone might be enough to get them what they need. “He gave me this when I told him you wouldn’t be pleased to learn of his activities.”

She presses play.

The recording is short, obviously a clipped version of something much longer. It’s still more than enough.

Based on what she knows now about traditions in Novoselic, Natsumi is reasonably certain the people there wouldn’t be pleased to see their princess in this new light. To say nothing of how the judges for the practical exams would react if, say, they saw the same footage as part of another exam before Sonia had a chance to give hers. It could ruin her reputation at home and her prospects at Hope’s Peak.

It’s simple. Easy. Perfect. Most importantly, it’ll work.

“Would you like me to put pressure on Satoya-sensei for copies of the full clip?” Peko asks, when the screen goes blank.

If Sonia isn’t already expecting something like this, that’s her own fault. Natsumi didn’t come to this school for youth and friendship and feel-good memories, she came for results. The advancement of the clan comes first, before everything. Yukizome could give a hundred speeches and that still wouldn’t change.

She snaps the laptop lid shut. “Do it.” She chews on the inside of her cheek, then adds, “And shut Satoya down, while you’re at it. Skeeze.”

Peko bows, and the door closes silently behind her when she leaves.

*

Yukizome hands out the final schedules for the practical exams a month in advance. “If you have any last preparations,” she tells them, “Now’s the time to finish them. If anyone needs help with anything, my door is always open.”

Natsumi’s exam is scheduled for the second block on the third day, in the morning. Peko’s is the third block, immediately after hers. Most of their classmates just have the full exam schedule and a few pages of orientation information for first year students, but Natsumi’s packet is thick, nearly fifteen pages longer.

“Yours is a bit of a special case, Kuzuryuu-san,” Yukizome explains. “Since the cameras and everything will be there this year, there’s a different procedure for your exam. They’d just like you to sign it to show you understand the differences. And, ah, they’d like Pekoyama-san to sign as well.”

“That’s not necessary,” Peko says.

Yukizome is sheepish when she smiles. “I understand. But if you’re going to be assisting Kuzuryuu-san with her exam—”

“What she’s saying is, there’s no point,” Natsumi repeats. “I’m taking responsibility for everything Peko-chan does, alright? They can put that in here if they want.” She skims through the last few pages of provisions, and then flips the whole packet closed. “Ugh, this thing is gonna take _forever._ ”

Yukizome just laughs. “That’s the way it goes, I’m afraid.” She hands Peko the same, thinner handout she gave to everyone else. “If that’s your decision, Kuzuryuu-san, that’s fine. I’ll tell the judges. Just get that back to me when you can, okay? And let me know if you need anything.”

They don’t, and they won’t. The rest of the day is already planned out— except for the part where Natsumi has to go back and read every word of these stupid provisions, apparently, just in case the judges try to pull one over on her— and there’s no going back anymore. She’s already confirmed the contracts with her new partners in Europe; all that’s left is for Peko to crack Satoya, and waiting for that is like waiting for the sun to rise.

She takes the whole packet back to her room to read, while Peko goes upstairs to room 3-A. She’s on page ten when the door opens; she doesn’t hear a single footstep between then and the moment Peko sets a thermos next to her elbow.

“What’s that?”

“Tea,” Peko says. She doesn’t have one for herself. “You were more stressed than normal in class this morning. I thought it might help calm your nerves.” 

Natsumi wraps her fingers around the body of the thermos and breathes in. It’s fresh-brewed peppermint, not the kava tea from the dining hall. “Guess you didn’t have a problem with Satoya then, huh?”

Peko unzips the top of her bag, and then unzips the hidden pocket in the inside lining. “He was much more agreeable after he heard your suggestion,” she says. She holds out a DVD in a thin blue case. 

Natsumi grins when she takes it. “Yeah, I thought he might.” Peko has written _KUZURYUU NATSUMI, #1_ on the front of the disc, the way Natsumi asked her to. It’s for submission to the judge panel during her practical exam; any additional materials must be labeled and numbered, for organization, and to ensure nothing is misplaced.

It’s a stupid rule. If any of the students here are doing their jobs right, the judges won’t forget anything presented to them for as long as they live.

“There are two additional copies,” Peko says. “One to be delivered to Sonia and one to be held by you, as insurance.” She sets those discs on the desk; their faces are both blank. “Should I bring one to Sonia’s dorm room tomorrow morning?”

Natsumi turns the disc over in her hands.

Sonia will hate her. She cares too much about the respect and goodwill of her people not to. Natsumi can see her in her head, spine straight and elbows locked, giving a long, off-the-cuff speech about a princess’s duty to the people and the sanctity of women’s bonds of friendship.

That’s fine. That’s the point. It’s Sonia’s mistake, not Natsumi’s. Koizumi and Satou hate her now, too, and that turned out better all around. The advancement of the clan comes first. That’s how it is.

Natsumi hears herself say, “No.”

“Young mistress?”

“There’s still time, right?” Natsumi tosses the first disc back onto the desk and reaches for her tea instead. “So you don’t have to bring it tomorrow. Before we do that, I have to— I need to decide what the next step is. You know? After.”

Natsumi can feel Peko’s eyes on her. She’s quiet a second too long. “Yes, young mistress.”

Natsumi feels a prickle in her gut. She can’t tell if she’s annoyed or afraid, but only one is ever any good to her. She pulls her feet into her chair and scowls at Peko over her knees. “What?”

Peko bows her head. “Forgive me. You seemed uncertain, but it’s not my place to doubt your judgment.” She doesn’t look up when she reaches out to lay her hand over the extra discs. “Should I keep these until you’re ready, or would you prefer to?”

Natsumi stares at them. It was a good plan. She did everything right. The Kuzuryuu Clan has never been able to fully solidify its reach outside of east and southeast Asia; once she does this, she’ll have already surpassed both her father and her uncle in every way, before she’s even become the boss. It’s why she came to this school in the first place. Nothing else should matter to her, because nothing else _does_ matter.

Maybe someone should be questioning her judgment.

Peko is looking at her again. Her face is lined with confusion and concern. “Young mistress?”

Natsumi hugs her knees against her chest. “What if I fuck this up, Peko?” Peko opens her mouth, but Natsumi cuts her off. “I don’t mean in a ‘I’m afraid I might mess something up’ way.” She breathes. It’s the only way she can think of to stop the prickling in her gut, which she knows now is definitely fear. “I mean in a ‘I’m thinking about fucking up months of work’ way.”

Peko still doesn’t hesitate. Peko never hesitates, not when it counts. “The decision is yours to make,” she says. “Whatever that decision is, I will support it in any way I can. You only need to say the word.”

There’s no room for uncertainty in her life anymore. If she stays this wishy-washy, it won’t matter what kind of boss she thinks she’ll make, because she’ll never become it.

She decides.

She slides the two blank discs back across the table, and keeps the labeled one for herself. “Hang on to these.” Peko doesn’t ask. She unzips her bag and tucks the discs back into the hidden internal pocket. “And I do need you to send a message. Just not to Sonia.”

“To who, then?”

“The Nagahara brothers.” Natsumi grabs her phone. She finds her cousin Rin in the contact list, and starts tapping out a message. “Tell them they’re fired. They can bring all their shipments back to the compound.” She stops mid-text to lift her head. “And _don’t_ tell my brother.”

“Yes, young mistress.”

Natsumi rifles through her desk for the envelope Fuyuhiko sent over months ago, the initial numbers from the European region. Her heart is pounding. There’s no going back after this, but that doesn’t matter. She has talent on her side. 

If she can’t pull this off, there’s no point in calling her ‘Ultimate’ at all. 

*

She stops by the classroom before breakfast a few days later. She sends Peko to the dining hall ahead of her; there’s no point in the both of them missing out on a good place in line for something that’ll only take a couple of minutes. 

Peko doesn’t need to see this part, anyway.

It’s still dim enough outside that Yukizome has to use a lamp at her desk. When Natsumi knocks on the frame of the door, she leans forward, hands folded over the papers she’s grading. “Good morning, Kuzuryuu-san. You’re early for class this morning.”

“I want to call in my favor,” Natsumi tells her.

“Oh.” Yukizome looks past her, out into the hallway, but beyond that she doesn’t try to be shady or obviously secretive, the way civilians usually are. “Well, all right. What can I do for you?”

“Komaeda-kun and Sonia-san’s practical exam dates.” She hates it, the way Yukizome’s face doesn’t even twitch with surprise. Natsumi thinks she could probably slap her across the face and Yukizome would still smile at her after. “I want them switched.”

Yukizome slides her chair back and pulls her copy of the final exam schedule from her desk. Even upside-down, Natsumi can see how she’s colored in the blocks designated for each of her classmates with a different color highlighter. Natsumi’s own block is green. “We’re awfully close to the exams, Kuzuryuu-san,” she sighs. “I wish you’d be better prepared. But I think I can take care of that for you.” She taps her index fingers against two of the blocks on the page, Komaeda’s blue one at the front and Sonia’s yellow one at the back. “That puts Sonia-san in the fourth morning block on the first day, and Komaeda-kun in the second afternoon block on the fifth day. That’s what you need?”

“That’s what I said.”

Yukizome smiles at her. “Okay. Consider it done.”

Natsumi waits for the other shoe to drop. When Yukizome only looks at her, she says, “That’s it?”

“That was the deal, right?” Yukizome pops the cap off of a red pen with her teeth and circles each of the blocks on her schedule, connected with a double-headed arrow. “You came to class, so you get one favor. No questions asked.” She lifts her head. “Unless you want to talk about it?”

“No, I don’t want to _talk_ about it.”

“Then I’ll see you in a bit,” Yukizome says. She points at the wall clock behind Natsumi’s head with her pen. “Make sure you grab some breakfast first, okay? It’s the most important meal of the day!”

Natsumi doesn’t have anything else to say. There’s really no going back now; it feels like it should be a bigger deal than a red pen and a few highlighters. But Yukizome goes back to grading, and there’s only a half-hour left for breakfast, so Natsumi slips back out into the hall.

When she gets to the dining hall, Peko is sitting at their regular table with two trays of food laid out for the both of them. She hasn’t touched hers; she’s tapping at her phone instead.

“Good morning, young mistress,” she says, when Natsumi sits down. She lays her phone face down on the table. “Were you able to finish what you needed to do?”

Sonia catches her eye from the other end of the dining hall. She’s sitting with Tanaka today, the both of them crowded around some ancient-looking book. Natsumi raises one hand when she waves. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m ready.”

*

The day of her exam comes. She and Peko show up to the gym first thing in the morning and sit together in the row of chairs set out for the five morning examinees. They spend the first half-hour watching news outlets set up their giant cameras along the entire back wall of the room, and the flood of onlookers after that. They fill every inch of bleachers and every extra chair, with dozens more still stuck in the standing room at the back.

The students are on display; this year the exams are as much a show put on for the outside world as they are an evaluation of the student body. Anyone would be stupid not to realize that.

The exam before hers is a senior named Mitsurugi, the Ultimate Prosecutor. His exam involves a lot of talking interspersed with shouting, like most of them; she tunes him out and focuses on the judges at the table behind him instead.

The one on the far left has a long, pointy face that makes her look like a rat. Next to her is a man whose forehead practically has the entire ceiling in its reflection. The head judge in the middle has a nose so big she can barely see the rest of his face behind it. The one on his left looks like she never learned how to tie a ponytail properly. The last one on the right is so pale he could fade into the wall if he closed his eyes.

She’d spent the time to learn all of their names already, but she renames them in her head; because she can, and because the less she thinks about the way her heart is clattering around in her chest, the less chance there is someone might notice. 

Mitsurugi gets graded right then and there, in front of everyone, and he passes with an almost perfect score. There’s scattered claps and whistles from the crowd during his entire procession back down the aisle, but he still looks like he swallowed a frog the wrong way when he sits back down beside her.

“For legal and security reasons we must ask everyone not associated with Hope’s Peak Academy faculty to leave the room for the examination of our next student,” Fat Nose announces, nasal and bored. “When we have reached the grading portion, press and public will be welcomed back into the auditorium. Thank you.” 

The gym yawns even larger when emptied out, Natsumi discovers. Peko and the other students up for examination are even asked to leave, too; only Natsumi, the judges, and a handful of observing teachers remain. Yukizome waves at her from the bleachers.

“Kuzuryuu Natsumi, the Ultimate Yakuza,” Fat Nose says. He’s still using the microphone, even though it makes his voice boom awkwardly loud in a room of ten people. “Please approach the stage.”

It’s stupid, having her walk up an aisle surrounded by empty seats on both sides like it’s something dramatic. But she does it anyway, in long, heavy steps that make the sound of her heels reverberate through the room. She wore them specifically for today.

She makes a show of looking all around the empty room when she gets to the top of the stairs. “Really?”

Rat Face and Fivehead both try to hide their smiles, but Fat Nose doesn’t even look up. “It’s important that the practical exams follow a standard format, Kuzuryuu-kun,” he says, “even under these special circumstances.” He pulls a disc from her file and holds it up for her to see. She can make out Peko’s blocky handwriting through the blue tint of the case. “This is what you submitted for your exam, correct?”

“Looks like it.”

“Then we’ll start there.” He holds the disc out for one of the faculty volunteers to take. “If we could get that loaded into the projector—”

Natsumi snickers.

“You have something to add, Kuzuryuu-kun?”

“Oh, nothing,” she says. “It’s your show, you know? But if you want my advice—” she points at the disc, “you definitely don’t want to see _that_ —” then at the massive screen behind the stage, “blown up onto _that._ ” 

Fat Nose puts his palm against his microphone and leans back to whisper with the other judges. After a moment he waves his other hand, and one of the faculty volunteers brings a laptop over instead. They load the disc in, and the six of them have to pull their chairs nearly on top of each other so they can all get a decent look at the screen.

Natsumi can’t hear the recording from where she’s standing, but she doesn’t need to.

“Is that a _student?_ ”

“Sonia Nevermind, the exchange student from 77-B. We took her exam just the other day—”

“The princess?!”

“I thought she’d seemed the adventurous type, but I had no idea…”

The recording finishes, and all six of them start to whisper at once. Fivehead clears his throat. “This is extremely concerning, Kuzuryuu-kun,” he says. “Where did you even get this footage?”

Natsumi inspects her nails. The one on the middle finger of her left hand is chipped. “I think it’s pretty obvious where I got it from,” she says. “What? You think this school gets a pass just because I’m a student here now? PS, you need to do a _much_ better job screening your employees. I handled it for you this time. You’re welcome.”

Pony Tail Bumps leans across the others and slams the laptop shut. She sputters something about security and data privacy to Fat Nose, and he waves his fingers at her.

“We will address that at another time.” He looks down his fat nose at his pad of paper and marks something down. “Is this all, Kuzuryuu-kun?”

“All?” Natsumi laughs. “She’s a _princess._ I could get her country to do anything I wanted with a recording like that.”

“Yes,” Fat Nose agrees. “And did you?”

That’s wrong. That’s not what he was supposed to say next.

She fumbles. “What?”

“Have you used this recording to extort the kingdom of Novoselic for the benefit of your clan’s businesses?”

The other judges have stopped fussing with each other, and are now all looking at her expectantly. Natsumi feels like she’s swallowed cotton.

“It’s a very straightforward question, Kuzuryuu-kun.”

Her cheeks burn. “No.”

“No, you have nothing else to present?”

“I said _no,_ all right?”

“I see.” Fat Nose writes something on his pad of paper, his wrist flicking in a quick, slashing line. “That will be all, Kuzuryuu-kun.” He lifts his eyes to the back of the room. “We are ready to enter the grading portion. Please welcome the audience back into the auditorium.”

She has to stand there and listen while hundreds of people filter their way back into the room. They’re talking and laughing and shouting each other’s names so they can sit in groups. She can hear the electric whine of cameras being booted up again, and has to listen to every single reporter practicing their variant of, “We’re back live on site at Hope’s Peak Academy—”

She refuses to either lower her eyes or give Fat Nose the satisfaction of looking her in the face, so she stares straight ahead through the gap between his head and Pony Tail Bumps’ ugly ponytail, and waits.

“Welcome back, everyone,” Fat Nose says into the microphone, after what has to have been hours, or days. The room behind her hushes and settles. Natsumi’s jaw is starting to ache. “Thank you for your patience. Kuzuryuu Natsumi has presented her exam, and our panel is prepared to enter the grading portion.”

The judges present their scores. They go one by one, down the line. Natsumi doesn’t let her chin drop once.

Passing, but only just barely.

The entire room, rows on rows of bleachers filled with reporters and other students and curious bystanders, begins to whisper.

“Kuzuryuu-kun,” Fat Nose begins. He sniffles right into the microphone. Natsumi’s ears are ringing. “While we have decided to pass you today, it is worth reminding you that the goal of Hope’s Peak Academy is for the constant development of the talents of our students. It is not sufficient to rest on the skills you had when you entered this school. We must warn you that if you do not display significant improvement over the next year, Hope’s Peak Academy will no longer be able to—”

“Excuse me,” Natsumi says, loud enough for the microphone to pick her up. “I think it’s pretty obvious there’s been a mistake.”

She can see Fat Nose squinting at her, but he isn’t the one she’s focused on. Pasty, squashed into the very last chair at the far end of the table, has been shrinking further and further down in his seat since the crowd came back in. He hasn’t spoken once during the entire exam, and even now he can’t quite look her in the face. When she stares at him, he stares back somewhere near her collarbone.

“— panel of course prides itself on fair, comprehensive judgment,” Fat Nose is saying. Natsumi stalks down the length of the table until she’s standing right in front of Pasty. “If you have a complaint, Kuzuryuu-kun, then you may submit an appeal through—”

“Watase-sensei,” Natsumi interrupts. Murmurs roll through the crowd behind her. She hasn’t looked back over her shoulder at them once. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t _help_ but feel like that isn’t the score you meant to give me. Don’t you think?” 

Pasty gapes at her, jaw hinging half-open and half-closed like a fish. “Kuzuryuu-kun,” Fat Nose says again. His nose is starting to flush red. “We are in the grading stage, you cannot—”

She looks sharply up at him. “This is my practical exam,” she says. “Isn’t it? Should I or should I not get the grade I’m owed?”

For the first time since she came in the room, Fat Nose falters. “O-Of course. I’m not disputing that, only—”

“So, how about it, Watase-sensei?” Natsumi leans over the edge of the judge’s table. When Pasty finally looks up at her, she smiles. “Is that the grade you think I’m owed? After what you’ve seen that I’m capable of?”

Natsumi feels the moment he cracks like a thrill in her chest. It reminds her of pointing her gun at a target and pulling the trigger.

Pasty turns his pad back toward himself. He laughs, trembling and small, as he scratches through his numbers. “Would you look at that! K-Kuzuryuu-kun is right on the money. So sorry, so sorry, I don’t— I don’t have any idea how th-that… that could have….”

Natsumi meets Fat Nose’s stare head-on as the scores are recalculated.

Passing, comfortably.

Fat Nose leans back into the microphone. “The score is final,” he bites out. Natsumi smiles at him. “Kuzuryuu Natsumi, you are dismissed. Pekoyama Peko, the Ultimate Swordswoman, please approach the stage.”

Peko makes eye contact with her when they pass each other in the center aisle. Her face doesn’t reflect an inch of the anger and humiliation Natsumi feels. Natsumi tries to latch on to her calm focus instead. (It doesn’t work.)

She’s supposed to go back to her seat and watch the other three exams after hers. There’s supposed to be a photo op at the end of the morning sessions. 

She walks straight out the door instead. Her phone is buzzing in her pocket before she even makes it over the threshold.

**sonia nevermind**  
08:59  
Good luck with your exam this morning! I hope you will have broken a leg. (Pile Of Poo )

**peko**  
09:26  
Please wait for me. I will rendezvous with you as soon as my exam is complete.

**fuyu-chan**  
09:33  
what the fuck just happened?

**fuyu-chan**  
09:33  
whoever that fucker was he looked like he was begging for a punch in the nose

**rin**  
09:34  
well that was a bust. you ok?

**fuyu-chan**  
09:35  
ignore mom I already told her to stop calling you

**mom**  
09:35  
We need to talk. Call when you get this.

Natsumi turns it off.


	4. Chapter 4

She starts getting messages from her European contacts within the day. The publicity of the practical exam was supposed to give her more time, but instead it’s made them all nervous, hand-wringing cowards. Suddenly the assurances they’d been happy to accept before aren’t enough. Suddenly she’s an unreliable partner, and they need more proof of commitment. Suddenly they all want to speak with her father, instead.

Natsumi won’t let them. It’s that simple. She can handle it. She has to handle it. It’s not any different than it was before, it’s just that her timetable is shortened now, that’s all.

The next morning, a car comes to pick her and Peko up for spring vacation. Most of the other students will stay to watch the rest of the exams, but Natsumi doesn’t care what any of them have cooked up. There’s too much left for her to do now, anyway. 

The ride back is long, and silent except for the insistent buzzing of Natsumi’s phone. Emails and texts and, once, a call from her contact in Marseille that boils down to an hour of him trying to pressure a better cut out of her.

She puts her phone back in her bag after that, and ignores it for the rest of the trip.

The front gates of the compound are beautiful in early spring, when the cherry trees are budding but not yet blooming. She likes it when there’s a mix of colors: the green and pink from the trees against the deep red of the gate. 

The blossoms must be late this year, though: she can’t make out the pink until the car pulls up right to the gate, and even then it’s only because she’s looking for it. They might be further along by the end of her vacation, but then again, there’s a better chance she’ll miss it entirely.

Only Fuyuhiko is waiting when the car pulls up the drive to the main house. He looks sullen, squinting into the sun with his arms crossed. It isn’t as if she expected the same sort of entourage she had as when she left for school, but even for summer break her parents and her aunt had been there to greet her, too.

She knows it’s not an accident or an oversight.

Natsumi rolls down the window to stick her head out. “Gee, be more of a welcome wagon, huh?”

“Will you just get out of the car already?”

The driver takes Natsumi’s bags up into the house. Fuyuhiko tussles with Peko over hers (“I’ve been standing out here all damn morning, at least give me something to _do,_ ”) until she relents. 

(She takes them back when she parts ways with them at the staff quarters. "I'll see you soon, young mistress." She bows at the waist, and it’s already strange to be separated from her during the day.)

The house is quiet. The staff smile and bow politely to her when they pass (“Welcome home, young mistress,”) but there’s no urgency to their routines. Everything is clean, but not spotless. The kitchen is empty in the late afternoon lull between lunch and dinner.

It’s normal for a Thursday, but not for her homecoming.

When they reach the study, she says, “They’re not here, are they?”

Fuyuhiko grimaces. His shoulders hunch when he shoves his hands deeper in his pockets. “They’re in Seoul,” he tells her. “‘Emergency business trip’. They’re supposed to be back by the middle of the week.”

She hates that some part of her is still surprised, when she knows she shouldn’t be. “Figures,” she says, and flops back onto the cushions of the couch. “Not like _that’s_ something worth telling me ahead of time.”

“Look, they’re—”

“You wanna play cards?” she interrupts. She swings her legs off the couch and reaches for the top desk drawer. “Everyone at school sucks. I’m so rusty you might actually have a chance of beating me this time.”

It’s so transparent it’s almost painful. She knows that; he must know it, too. He sits down next to her anyway, legs crossed under him on the couch.

“So,” he says, after she’s started to deal the cards between them. “You gonna tell me what happened?”

She loses count. She has to poke through his to see how many she’s given him already. “What happened with what?”

“Don’t give me that crap. You know what I’m talking about.”

“There’s nothing to say,” Natsumi tells him. “I couldn’t get her to say yes to a partnership. That’s it.” She nudges his cards toward him. “Now play.”

“Bullshit. You expect me to believe that?”

“Well, it’s what happened!” she snaps. “So yeah! I do!”

He doesn’t buy it. (It was admittedly not her best.) She can feel him staring at the side of her head, so she focuses on her hand. It’s garbage. “You’re telling me that you— _you_ — couldn’t convince her. Last year you convinced an elementary school teacher to run for us out the back of the school playground.”

“That one wasn’t even hard,” Natsumi mutters. “He was up to his ears in gambling debts, all anybody needed was eyes to see that.”

“And you couldn’t find an angle on the princess,” he goes on. “Nothing? You had Peko running around for two goddamn weeks and you couldn’t find anything?”

“Jeez,” she tries, laughing, “If this is about Peko, for the _last_ time—”

That doesn’t work either. He doesn’t flinch or flush or even look away. Maybe she’s just lost her touch. “Don’t try to pull that shit on me. You _know_ what this is about. What the fuck is going on, Natsumi?”

“Just—” She winces when her voice cracks. “Don’t. Okay? It’s fine. I’m handling it.” He squints at her. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

He lets it go, but only just barely. She lays her cards on the table before he can change his mind.

He’s frowning when he lays his cards down over hers. “I win,” he says. “Deal ‘em again.”

*

She takes her old SLR camera out into the garden, because she feels like it. She’d found it on one of the shelves in her bedroom, dusty and obsolete, but workable. The plum trees are in full bloom, unlike the cherry trees outside, and they’ve scattered white and pink petals all across the little artificial pond at the center of the courtyard. It's pretty, and she’s always preferred taking pictures of nature over portraits of people.

Natsumi crouches down to take a close-up of one of the koi carp investigating a blossom spinning on the surface of the water. It opens its mouth wide and flares its gills, and when she snaps the picture it looks like it’s about to swallow the little blossom whole. The camera has clear focus and a powerful zoom; even this dumb photo of a fish comes out better than anything she’s snapped on her phone in the past year. She sits back on her heels to take another picture of the tree over her head, the plum blossoms dappled in light and shadow. 

A plum tree is beautiful in its own way no matter what time of year it is; people are flighty and performative, especially in pictures. It’s easier for a person to ruin a good picture than a flower or a cat or a mountain.

She sits on one of the garden benches to page her way through her photos. It was always Koizumi who was obsessed with taking pictures of people, back in their middle school photography club. Of course people liked that better; everyone likes to see photos of themselves. Natsumi never bought into it. Koizumi’s pictures were always simple, inoffensive, safe. Social media pictures. 

Through the open shōji she can see her brother and Peko standing together just inside the house. He’s telling her a story while he helps her set out plates and cups for an afternoon snack; Natsumi can tell because he keeps waving his hands around, even when Peko reaches for something he’s holding. He says something that makes her smile, and there’s a moment where both of them are smiling at each other and neither of them are saying anything.

Natsumi frames them in her camera’s viewfinder, but by the time she presses the shutter the moment’s already passed. It’s not a _bad_ picture— it’s still cute and the image is crisp, and anything that preserves her brother’s dopey smile is good in her opinion— but it still isn’t _right._ You can’t boil people or relationships down into a single image, that’s what she’s said from the beginning. She doesn’t know how Koizumi does it, or why she even bothers.

Maybe that’s the difference between her and Koizumi, though. Maybe that’s why Hope’s Peak saw Ultimate talent in her pictures and not Natsumi’s.

Fuyuhiko and Peko bring a plate of Peko’s dango out to her. (That is, Fuyuhiko does, after he takes one from where Peko has it balanced on her forearm.) He doesn’t say anything when he sits down next to her, just holds it out for her to take. Natsumi takes a picture of it before she does.

(Peko isn’t supposed to cook, it’s not her role in the household, but she likes it, and her dango are Natsumi’s favorites, so she does it anyway.)

Fuyuhiko scoots over to give Peko room to sit next to him, and he pokes Natsumi with his elbow until she scoots, too. The three of them are more squished on this bench now than they used to be when they were kids, but that doesn’t matter. Natsumi holds her food in her lap while she plays with the camera’s built-in filters. “How is that thing, anyway?” he asks her, mouth half full. “I figured you weren’t ever gonna use it again.”

Natsumi picks a filter with bright, oversaturated colors, and lets the camera drop on its strap around her neck so she can eat. “Eh. It’s okay, I guess.”

“’Okay’? The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it sounds like! Jeez, you’re the one who asked.”

“It’s old, but it’s not like it’s a piece of crap. Gimme that.” He jerks the camera toward him and flips through her pictures, one by one. “How many different pictures can you take of bushes?”

Peko leans over to look; the bottom of one of her braids brushes against his shoulder. “I like them,” she says. 

Natsumi feels her brother go very still. The strap tugs around her neck when he tries to pull the camera over to give Peko more room, but Natsumi doesn’t give him any slack.

“I mean, sure. They’re… pretty, I guess.”

“The garden is well-maintained. But the young mistress does more than just photograph the flowers.”

“That doesn’t make any goddamn sense.” He taps the ‘next’ button with the edge of his thumb to scroll through all the pictures. “Look, it’s a flower. Look, there’s three flowers. Flower, flower, fish, flower—”

He lands on the picture of the two of them inside the house. Natsumi nearly laughs and chokes when he pulls abruptly down on the camera’s strap, like hiding it against his stomach is somehow better than the alternative.

Then her phone buzzes in her breast pocket. 

It’s a phone call, not a text or an email, and she doesn’t need to look to know it’s coming from an international number. She lets it ring out anyway. She’s tired. She just wants to take pictures and laugh at her brother’s expression when he sees the stupid faces he makes in them. 

The call goes to voicemail. She has enough time to bite another dango off the stick before it starts to ring again. 

She pulls it out of her pocket. Greece.

Her camera jerks out of Fuyuhiko’s hands when she stands. He frowns up at her. “What the hell? Where are you going?”

“I have to take this.” The number stares up at her from the screen. She can see the icon for the previous missed call in the corner. He’s definitely going to ask her for an explanation, and she definitely has to have one.

“Who is it?”

“Don’t worry about it! Here, go take some of your own if you think you can do so much better.” She swings the strap off her neck and dumps it over his. 

“Natsumi—”

“Let’s go, Peko.”

Peko gets up to follow, but not before she lingers, just a second too long. 

Natsumi doubts her brother even notices.

*

She loses three of the contracts before dinner.

They all think she’s weak, but none of them are brave enough to tell her that’s why they’re welching. The Croatians tell her that they’d decided to go in another direction. The French make up some bullshit about shipping costs and the viability of the market in Asia. The Spaniards say they “don’t like where the wind is blowing.”

She tries everything she can think of. She ups their cuts. She promises no-charge protection and guaranteed legal immunity. She flirts. She shouts. She holds her knife in one hand and mentally pages through Peko’s forms while she talks about how the Kuzuryuu Clan responds to being disappointed.

Her contact in A Coruña hangs up on her, and she throws her phone across the room.

The bottom left edge hits the floor at an awkward angle and sends a spider web of cracks out over the screen. She considers just leaving it there, broken and useless in the corner, but then the screen lights up again behind all the cracks, and she can’t just ignore it. She scoops it back up on her way out of the room.

The kitchen staff sets out dinner in the smaller family dining room (ginger pork, the chef tells her with a broad smile and clasped hands, her favorite). Their parents have their designated seats on one side of the table, and the children have theirs on the other; even with two of them empty, neither she nor Fuyuhiko feel like upsetting that configuration. They kneel together at the table, and Natsumi sticks Fuyuhiko with her chopsticks when he tries to take the bigger serving of the pork. Peko takes her place behind Natsumi’s seat, hands folded in her lap.

The silence is stifling. Fuyuhiko keeps looking at her. (She has no idea how he made it this far in this family without learning any kind of subtlety.) She tries to focus on just getting through her dinner so she can get back to work.

Her phone starts to buzz in her pocket. She drops her chopsticks to answer it, but her hand only makes it far enough to rub the inside corner of her right eye.

Fuyuhiko says, “Natsumi.”

The call rings out, and she feels it buzz again with a voicemail. She thinks about excusing herself to go listen to it, but by now it’s nearly pointless, isn’t it? There’s no point in pretending this is doable anymore. 

“I had dirt on the princess of Novoselic and I didn’t use it,” she says into her bowl.

He’s mid-bite when she says it. He chews slowly, and then all he has to say is, “What?”

She doesn’t look at him. She pushes a single grain of rice in a circle around the lip of the bowl. “Are you deaf now, too? I said I could have blackmailed Sonia Nevermind into taking the deal and I didn’t. That’s why I almost failed, all right? Since you wanted to know so bad.” Her voice wobbles. She won’t let it crack again. “They said it wasn’t good enough that I had it but didn’t do anything with it.”

He’s silent for too long. She wants to see the face he’s making but can’t bring herself to look. “Fuck, Natsumi,” he says finally. “Why the hell would you do something like that?”

Her grain of rice is a third of the way around her bowl. She slows it down. “Does it matter? It’s over. It happened.”

“Uh, considering you had millions riding on it, yeah, I think it kinda fucking matters.” He’s rubbing at his face. She manages to look at him, sideways. “I thought you already confirmed all those contracts?”

“I did.” He jerks his head back to look at her, eyebrows high. “It’s fine! Everybody’s getting what they paid for.“ She looks back down at her grain of rice. “For now.”

“And how exactly are you pulling that off? I thought Novoselic was supposed to be your silver bullet.”

“You think I’d do something this big without a backup plan?” It doesn’t come out the way she wants it to. It sounds too much like an actual question. “Rin’s got her people handling it.”

He groans. “ _Rin_ is? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“It’s fine! She has people moving worse things across the border all the time.”

“That’s not the point! There’s no way her and her gaggle of gun nuts are going to be able to keep up once the rest of these contracts start kicking in.”

“It’s plan B. It was never supposed to be permanent.” The rice has already made two laps by now, so she picks at her napkin instead. For once in her life she misses the paper ones from Hope’s Peak’s dining hall; it’d be a lot more satisfying if it tore. “That’s why I need your help, obviously.”

“My help,” he repeats.

She nods.

He doesn’t say anything else. He drops his chopsticks onto his plate with a clatter, and stands up from the table.

Her stomach clenches. “Where are you going?”

“To make some phone calls, since we’ve apparently got a lot of fuckin’ work to do,” he answers. “What’re you wasting time for?” He picks up his plate, and cradles his cup in the crook of his arm. One of the kitchen staff steps forward to help him with the dishes, but he waves him off. “Come on. We’re taking the rest of this to-go.”

Peko helps them carry the serving platters.

*

They turn one of the smaller spare rooms into a war room. All the furniture gets stowed away except for the low table at the center. (And every single pillow Natsumi owns, which she gets Peko to bring in before Fuyuhiko can tell her not to. If they’re going to be up all night, she might as well be comfortable.) They set up both their laptops and pool all the relevant paper documents they have: hard copies of old contracts and new ones, historical data on moving product through the region, things Natsumi’s read so many times she’s sure she’ll remember them for the rest of her life. The floor turns into a mess of charge cables, USB cords, and unorganized papers. 

Natsumi focuses on renegotiating the remaining contracts, and Fuyuhiko focuses on securing longer term shipping partners. Peko drops in and out all afternoon; first she has training, then the rest of her chores. When she is in the room with them, she lets them bounce ideas and frustrations off her, sometimes at the same time.

Fuyuhiko waves over his shoulder at her when she comes back after being gone for a few hours. He’s bent over one of the folders Natsumi put together at school. “Hey,” he says, “How long do you have?” He rubs the space between his eyes with the flat of his hand. “And how in the fuck do you keep track of anything like this, Natsumi?”

She sticks her tongue out at him.

“The rest of the night,” Peko answers. When he only looks at her, she points at the window. “Most everyone has gone to bed, Fuyuhiko-sama.”

“Oh,” he says. “Right. Good.”

They keep going for hours after that. Natsumi dozes off somewhere around three in the morning. She doesn’t sleep for very long, or very deeply; she can make out the sound of people talking around her before she’s properly awake. Even whispering, her brother is too loud. 

“—just listen to me, for once?” Fuyuhiko is saying. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t wake up with a neck cramp or something, if that’s what you’re so worried about.”

“That’s not necessary. I’ll stay with her. You should get some sleep.”

“Peko, you got up at four this morning.”

“You don’t need to worry. I can stay awake for up to thirty-six hours without any loss of faculties.”

“That’s not what I…. Are you hearing what I’m saying at all? She was running you all over the damn place even when you were at _school_. You deserve to have a break too, you know.”

Peko doesn’t answer, or if she does, Natsumi can’t hear it. She feels the tatami tug when Fuyuhiko shifts his weight. “Listen,” he says, his voice wound tight with frustration, and he’s actually quiet this time, enough that Natsumi has to strain to hear him, “I said I wouldn’t argue with you about this again, and I’m not. All right? That’s not what this is about. All I’m saying is you should sleep if you’re tired.”

Peko still doesn’t say anything. Natsumi understands why before Fuyuhiko does; she can feel Peko looking at her. It at least took her longer than normal to notice.

Natsumi stretches her toes and sniffles into her elbow. She makes as much of a production of it as possible, so that Fuyuhiko doesn’t have any excuse not to be paying attention. She throws in a big yawn and some exaggerated blinking for good measure.

Right on cue, he clams up. When she sits up to rub at her eyes she spies them sitting close enough together that their knees are almost touching, before he scoots back across the floor.

“Jerks,” Natsumi whines. “You didn’t wake me up! I can’t sleep yet, there’s still stuff to do.”

“You’re not going to get anywhere with anyone if you’re falling asleep on the phone, dumbass.”

Natsumi jumps on the opening. It’s too easy, sometimes. “Good point! Hey, Peko, there’s energy drinks in the mini fridge in my room. Can you go get them?” 

Peko rises to her feet in a single, smooth motion. “Yes, young mistress.” Fuyuhiko doesn’t look up at her when she steps around him to get to the door. 

Natsumi counts to ten in her head after Peko slides the shōji closed, and then she shoves her laptop over so she can lean both elbows on the table. “So! What’s going on with you and Peko?”

Fuyuhiko does his best not to rise to her bait, but she can read him better than he thinks she can. His eyes flick to her face, even if it’s only for a second, and his opposite hand curls into a loose fist. “The hell are you talking about?”

She pokes the lid of his laptop with one finger; he forces it back up with the heel of his hand. “Are you seriously still this dense?” He lifts his eyes enough to glare at her over the top edge of the screen. She sighs at the ceiling. “I wasn’t asleep, dummy.”

That does the trick. He flushes up to his ears. “You were _eavesdropping?_ Goddammit, how childish can you be?”

“I _was_ sleeping until you woke me up. It’s not my fault you don’t know how to whisper.” She puts her chin in both hands. “Don’t change the subject. Are you guys fighting about something?”

He grits his teeth. She can see where the muscles jump in his jaw. “No.”

“You’re a crappy liar. I dunno what Peko would even _want_ to argue about, though. It sounded to me—”

“Well, it wasn’t,” he snaps. “It’s fine, all right? So just leave it alone.” He slams the keys of his laptop harder than he needs to. “Not like it was any of your fucking business to start out with.”

She could push it. She usually does. Usually he wants the opportunity to rant and complain to her and just doesn’t want to admit it, but this time feels different. She was only teasing, but the way he hunches his shoulders over his keyboard makes her think she touched a real nerve. Which would be fine; usually he’d talk to her about those things, too.

Not this time, maybe.

“Fine,” she says eventually. “Be like that.” She sits up to fluff the pillow under her belly. “But if you like her that much, you should at least do something about it.”

“For the love of—”

“I’m not teasing, I’m being serious.”

He stands up from the table too fast; he ends up knocking his knees against the edge of it. He plucks his phone from where it’s set near her elbow. “It doesn’t work like that,” he says. His face is pinched as he dials. “How do you still not get that?”

He turns his back on her before she can say anything. He doesn’t look at her again after the line connects, even though she spends his entire conversation glaring at the back of his head. He’s right: she doesn’t get it. She’s never understood how one person can be so determined to stand in his own way when what he wants is right in front of him.

Peko comes back with a four pack of drinks. Fuyuhiko drinks two of them and spends the rest of the night on the phone.

*

The second night starts out worse than the first.

They settle on creating a shipping network in lieu of the central waypoint Novoselic would have been. It’s more expensive and involves pulling manpower from other groups, but it also opens doors to more deals in other regions and protects them from having a single point of failure, which was the whole problem in the first place. (That, and hiring a bunch of incompetents.)

It also means sweet talking a whole lot of people into doing what they want.

Fuyuhiko gets into a shouting match with a potential partner at two thirty in the morning, while Natsumi tries to salvage the last of the Greece contracts over email. He paces the room in tight circles, the phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder so that his hands are free to page through numbers and percentages and projections.

“Listen here, fucker, I didn’t ask for a goddamn laundry list of your excuses, all right? … ‘Cause it’s not a fucking reason, that’s why! Yeah. _Yes._ … Like hell it is! I’ve given you those numbers six fucking times now, and they all say the same goddamn thing! ... Are you _kidding me?_ That’s bullshit. … What? ... How is _your_ fuck up supposed to be _our_ fault? Yeah, _your_ fuck up, asshole, you fuckin’ heard me.” 

Natsumi isn’t sure which one of them hangs up, but someone does; Fuyuhiko jerks the phone away from his ear and hurls it into the pile of pillows she constructed on the floor. He doesn’t bother going digging for it; he just flops back on top of them, too, one arm thrown over his eyes.

Even still, they’ve made progress. Decent progress, even: it’s looking like they’ll definitely save the existing business in the region, if not improve on it. 

That doesn’t change the fact that this is a joke compared to what it was supposed to be. She doesn’t feel like congratulating herself for staying above water when she was the one cutting holes in the bottom of the boat. They’re wasting all this time and energy, for what? Because she wanted to be Sonia Nevermind’s friend? Sonia hasn’t even texted her once since spring vacation started. It’s beyond pathetic.

Natsumi stares at the blank counter of her inbox until her eyes hurt. Her head feels hazy and her chest feels tight, and it just comes out: “It should be you. You know?”

Fuyuhiko shifts his arm to peer at her.

She wants to slap the lid of the laptop shut, if just for the satisfaction of it. If something comes in, her phone will go off; there’s no reason for her to keep watching it like a lifeline. She still doesn’t, though. “Leading the clan. Hope’s Peak. It should be you, not me.”

He sits up. She rubs at her eyes so at least later she can pretend they’re red because she hasn’t slept.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “did you not listen to a single fucking word of the phone call I was just on?”

“Yeah, I did,” she snaps back. “And if it’d been you, you wouldn’t have had to talk to that dumbass at all.”

“You’re right. I wouldn’t have had to talk to him, because I wouldn’t have had the guts to get this far in the first place.” She doesn’t realize he’s gotten up until he leans down and snaps her laptop shut for her. “Seriously, Natsumi?”

“You were right about Niijima.”

“That doesn’t mean I should be the one calling the shots all the time.” He drops down to sit cross-legged next to her, and rubs both hands into his forehead. “And even if it did, I don’t want to anyway. So you’re stuck with it.”

She goes quiet. It feels lighter than it did before, at least, like they’re actually taking a break instead of just gearing up for the next wave. She slouches in her sweatshirt until the hood rides up past her ears. “Why not?” she asks, quiet. “You’d be good at it.”

He laughs, a rush of air through his nose. “No, I wouldn’t.” He scrubs one hand back through his hair. “Are you kidding? The only reason I’m halfway decent at any of this shit is because of you.”

Her phone pings. It’s her contact in Athens, agreeing to her terms. There are some strict counter-terms, but nothing the two of them can’t manage.

Fuyuhiko bumps her shoulder with his. “See?” He pushes himself up to standing, and wanders back over to the pillows to go diving for his phone. “Now cut it out with the self-pitying shit. We’ve got work to do.”

*

Their parents arrive back from Seoul early in the morning. Natsumi couldn’t have slept more than one or two hours; the sky is still dark when Peko nudges her awake, one firm hand on her shoulder.

“I apologize, young mistress,” she says. She keeps her voice soft; Natsumi struggles to understand why, her mind still murky and sleep-addled, until her eyes adjust enough to make out her brother passed out on the other futon. “But Master Kuzuryuu has called for you.”

Natsumi finds her feet, and is able to navigate her way out of the room without waking Fuyuhiko or tripping over the precarious tangle of laptop cords. She’s still dressed in the same jeans and sweatshirt she was wearing last night, but if her father asked to see her as soon as he got in, then there’s already not enough time to change. She flattens down the wrinkles in her clothes as best she can, ties the mess of her hair into a high ponytail, and tries in vain to rub the sleep out of her eyes.

Her father is waiting for her in one of the smaller gardens near the back of the house. It’s not much more than a few flowering bushes and a carefully designed arrangement of stones, but it’s quiet, and most importantly, private. He’s standing at the center, inspecting a white-petaled flower in one big hand. 

He never smokes his cigarettes in the gardens, but he must have had one just before coming; Natsumi can smell acrid smoke still clinging to his clothes when he turns toward her. He twists the flower off the plant, and lifts it in the direction of the small, decorative bench that acts as the garden’s centerpiece. She takes the cue to sit.

“You and your brother have been busy,” he says.

She falters, even though she should have known better. Of course he’d know about what they were doing. There’s no reason he wouldn’t, and her father has never pulled a punch in her life. “Yeah,” she says, “We were making some— arrangements. For the contracts I was working on. That’s all.”

“Covering for your mistake,” he says in plain, even tones, “you mean.”

Natsumi nearly swallows her tongue. She laughs instead to give herself more time to think, and reaches up to smooth back a wisp of hair that’s fallen loose from her ponytail. “Dad, it’s fine.” No one would ever call her father a warm person, but today there’s no give in his stare at all. Her words trip on the way out of her throat. “It— There was a hiccup, okay? Yeah. But we’re still clearing a bigger profit in that region than we were before. If you look at the contracts me and Fuyu-chan put together, I think—”

“You think I want to hear about contracts?”

Her train of thought evaporates. She’d had a speech ready in her head, one she’d been rehearsing since the car ride home from school. It was about how she was making money for them, not losing it, even if it hadn’t gone the way she’d planned. It was about expansions and alliances and how she’d saved the ones she did, and not at all about the ones she didn’t. It was about contracts.

“I don’t—” He doesn’t give her any prompt or leading hint. Frustration flares in her belly. “Well, that’s what we were working on! So what, then?”

It’s the wrong answer. His eyes narrow. “What did I say to you when you left for school, Natsumi? The clan is watching. The _world_ is watching.” He makes an expansive hand gesture, the flower held in his palm like a goblet. “You said you understood. That you were _ready_ for the responsibility.”

She doesn’t understand, until she does. “Is this about my _exam?_ ” He levels a stare at her, which as much of an answer as she needs. She has to hold on to the bottom of her seat to keep from springing out of it. “My grade is fine! I handled it!”

“‘Handled,’” he echoes. “Is that what you call that public display of desperation? ‘Handling’ the situation?”

“I— Those judges were—”

“You made a sub-par presentation and you knew it,” he says over her. He hasn’t even raised his voice. She thinks if she were shouting he’d still drown her out. “After the scene you made, the rest of the world knows it, too. This isn’t about _money,_ Natsumi. This is about _you._ ” The last of her protest shrivels in her throat. “Is that the woman you’ve become? Someone who makes excuses? Someone who blames others for her own mistakes?

“Tell me, do you think this clan deserves a woman like that as its leader?”

Natsumi’s cheeks are burning. She drops her head to hide them, spending a moment to wish she hadn’t tied her hair back, and says nothing.

Her father answers for her, his voice like ice: “No.”

She’s never seen him angry before. Not like this, quiet and unyielding, and especially never towards her. He gets into shouting arguments with Fuyuhiko on the regular, and his fights with their mother have drawn blood more times than Natsumi can count, but she’s always been her father’s little girl. The clan’s princess. His expectations for her have always been high, but only because she’s always met them. She could run circles around Fuyuhiko with the slack she’s given, and she’s known it for most of her life.

Maybe that changed when she started at Hope’s Peak. Maybe that should have been obvious to her from the beginning. She feels like a stupid dog at the end of a leash, who doesn’t know when it’s been drawn back against its throat.

“So I miscalculated,” she mutters, her head low. “Once. _One_ time.”

Her father pulls a slim pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, and slides one out to hold between his teeth. He won’t light it until he’s out of the garden. “I see,” he says. “And do you think your ratio of good intentions will stop our people from whispering behind your back, when the time comes?”

Natsumi’s throat feels tight, so she only shakes her head. Her cousin Yuina already does whisper behind her back. She’s not naive enough to think there aren’t others.

How many more do now?

“There’s no room for you to act like a child anymore,” her father is saying. “You are a leader now. You represent this family. You represent me. You represent all the people who will serve under you someday. At some point you need to understand that the decisions you make affect more than just yourself.“

He drops the flower on the ground. He doesn’t crush it under his shoe, or sweep it behind the rocks; he just leaves it there to interrupt the aesthetic of the space until it rots. 

“Go wash up,” he tells her. The sky above them has faded to pale pinks, blues, and golds. “It’s time for breakfast.”

*

She goes back to her room and splashes cold water on her face until her cheeks are ruddy. Her eyes are still red around the edges and purple underneath, but that’s fine; the point is, it wakes her up. Everything else she fixes with makeup: dark liner around her eyes, pale powder on her cheeks, and lots and lots of concealer. She twists her hair out of its ponytail and brushes it out smooth. She throws her jeans and sweatshirt into the laundry basket and pulls her favorite black dress from her closet.

She hasn’t been feeling like herself. She hasn’t _been_ herself. That changes now.

Peko is waiting for her outside her bedroom. She bows when Natsumi steps out into the hall. “Good morning, young mistress.” Natsumi jerks her chin when she passes; Peko nods and falls into step behind her.

Fuyuhiko is already sitting when they get to the dining room. He’s changed his clothes, at least, but his hair is still rumpled and he looks like he’s one too-long blink away from falling asleep right there at the table. She reaches out to muss the back of his head when she kneels down next to him, and he doesn’t manage much more than a jerk of his shoulders and a muttered, “Fuck off.”

He livens up when the food starts to come out; the kitchen staff set out plates of grilled salmon and bowls of rice and fresh greens in advance of their parents coming to the table, and he sits up straighter to get a better look at each of them when they come out.

Anxiety bubbles in her chest. “Hey,” she says, on impulse. “You’d help me if I needed it, right?”

“I sure hope so,” he answers. He’s preoccupied with maneuvering the bowl of pickled plums closer to his side of the table. “‘Cause otherwise I don’t know what the fuck I’ve been doing the past couple days.”

Their parents come into the dining room together, their father in the same suit, and their mother in a shining white and gold kimono. They look pristine, the both of them, even though they must have been up hours before her, and travelling for most of it.

She waits for her opportunity. It needs to be near the end of breakfast, when everyone is in the best mood possible, but that involves _waiting_ until the end of breakfast. She’s too anxious to enjoy her food and too nauseous to pretend, so she takes only a small piece of fish and only picks at her rice.

(Fuyuhiko notices. She can see him looking at her from the corner of her eye, his eyebrows pinched together. She doesn’t look back.) 

“I want to ask for something,” she says, finally, when she can’t put it off anymore. “For school.”

Their mother sets her chopsticks down delicately. She lifts her chin. “It’s good to hear you’re beginning to take school seriously, Natsumi,” she says. “What is it?”

She made the mistake of not committing to the right choice once. She’s not going to do it again. She twists her fingers together under the table, and keeps her eyes forward when she says, “I want Fuyuhiko to enroll at Hope’s Peak with me.”

Fuyuhiko chokes on his soup.

“Your brother wasn’t scouted for enrollment,” their father says. His gaze doesn’t break from hers even while Fuyuhiko pounds his chest. “Hope’s Peak doesn’t allow unscouted transfers.” 

She knows he knows the answer. He’s testing her resolve, because that’s where she failed before. She tosses her hair. “Obviously,” she says. “He doesn’t need to enroll in the main course. There’s another branch of the school with open enrollment. All we’d have to do is pay the tuition. Boom, done.”

“You have your tool with you already,” their mother offers. “Is she not fulfilling her duties?”

Peko is silent and still behind her. “It’s not that,” Natsumi says. “Peko does what I need her to do, but it’s not like she can do everything. It’s a different skill set.” She finds firm ground. “I need them both.”

Their parents look at each other. They’re considering. Natsumi holds her breath.

“Hey!” Fuyuhiko has both hands balled into fists on the table. His knuckles are white. “Don’t I get a say in this?”

Their father looks at him. His gaze is heavy, but her brother doesn’t bend under the weight of it. “You have an objection, Fuyuhiko?”

“Yeah, I got an objection. I got a lot of objections.” He sits up on his heels, and counts them off on his fingers. “It’s a waste of money, for one. The Reserve Course is the most blatant money grab I’ve ever seen. It’s only there for Hope’s Peak to dupe as many pathetic morons as they can into shelling out. For _two,_ there’s nothing I can do that the two of them can’t do already. It makes more sense for me to stay here. For three—” His tone is vicious. Natsumi can feel his glare on the side of her face. “I don’t fucking want to go.”

Their mother’s dagger-glare does cow him, at least a little. “Language.” He ducks his head and glares sideways instead.

“Natsumi.” Their father’s gaze turns on her. “Your brother has voiced concerns. Do you believe his services are still necessary?”

Fuyuhiko is staring at her. Natsumi focuses on their father, his face like stone and his eyes like steel. She can be that. She has to be that. Bending wasn’t ingenuity, it was weakness. She knows that now.

She breathes in, and her voice doesn’t shake at all when she says, “Yes.”

“Explain that to him.”

Turning her head makes her feel like there’s a weight attached to the bottom of her skull. It turns out there’s steel in her brother’s eyes, too, but it isn’t cold like their father’s. It’s searing.

“We can cover the cost,” she tells him. “And I can’t be everywhere at once. You can help better there than you can here.” _And the clan comes first,_ her mind supplies, but the words stick in her throat. “And we’re a good team,” she says instead, and she hates the way her voice wilts.

His face twists. It’s like he’s smelled something sour, or like he’s found cheese in his dinner; like she’s disgusted him down to his core. He slams both hands down on the table to stand up, and it sends cups and cutlery clattering together. “Bull _shit._ ”

Fuyuhiko would never hurt her. She knows that. Everyone in the room knows that. Not because they don’t fight; they do. The whole family does, and always has. (When he was nine he sprained his wrist after she shoved him off the low branch of a tree for teasing her about losing a climbing race.) But he’s too gentle, with her and with everyone. Always has been.

She’s running on no sleep today, though, and so is he. Her nerves are stripped raw, and when he looms over her, fury in his face, she flinches.

That single flutter of her eyelashes is all it takes to put Peko on her feet. She’s expressly forbidden from drawing her weapon on any member of the Kuzuryuu family, but Peko is enough of a weapon on her own for that not to matter. One moment Natsumi is staring up at her brother while her cup is still spinning on the table, and the next Peko’s shoulder cuts between them.

The room is silent. Their parents just sit there and watch, like this was the predictable twist of some television drama and they’re disappointed it met their expectations. Her brother is the only one apparently wound up enough to be surprised, and he jerks back, momentum broken.

Peko doesn’t follow him, but she also doesn’t budge from where she’s standing in his space. “Fuyuhiko-sama,” she says, her voice low. “Please sit back down.”

He stares up into her face for a long, tense moment. Whatever he’s looking for there, he doesn’t find it; the anger in his expression cracks with something else. “Get out—” he spits, every word dragged painfully out through the trap of his teeth, “—of my _fucking_ face.”

Peko does not move.

Natsumi says, “Stand down.” It’s only then that Peko obeys, her place taken again behind Natsumi’s seat. Peko’s head is low and her eyes are downcast, but Fuyuhiko isn’t looking at her anyway. He isn’t looking at anyone; he stares at the back wall without blinking, shoulders drawn together and both fists clenched so tight there’s no way he won’t leave marks.

“Then we’re in agreement,” their father says. Fuyuhiko doesn’t look at him, either. “The both of you will return to Hope’s Peak for the new school year. The rest will be handled.” 

Fuyuhiko turns on his heel and walks out. The shōji rattles in its frame when he forces his way through, and he just leaves it like that: half-open, drawing a draft in from the walkway outside.

One of the kitchen staff rises from the back of the room to close it behind him.


	5. Chapter 5

Sonia knows.

Natsumi doesn’t know how, but it doesn’t matter. Probably she found out the same way Natsumi did: with good information and better sway with people equipped to act on it. Just because Natsumi’s exam wasn’t publicized doesn’t mean it was private, and there’s a small, unassuming girl in the now-senior class whose talent is the Ultimate Hacker. If it didn’t happen now, it would have eventually.

Knowing that doesn’t stop the restless churn of her stomach when she turns the corner and finds Sonia waiting for her out in the hall before morning homeroom, though. Her back is straight and her hands are folded in front of her; Natsumi recognizes the princess in her, all ice and etiquette, the same face she’d been so quick to shed before.

“Kuzuryuu-san.” Sonia doesn’t bow to greet her, not even the polite, shallow one she greets everyone with. “If you have time after class, I would like it if we could speak in private.”

There are eyes on the side of her face; Saionji openly snickers behind her hand when she and Koizumi brush past them into the classroom. Peko steps up behind her left shoulder, a looming presence made of as much cold steel as Sonia’s, but Sonia’s gaze refuses to break.

“Sure,” Natsumi says. “Whatever.” She lets her shoulder brush Sonia’s when she strolls past her into the classroom. “Not for too long, though, okay? I’m a busy woman, you know.”

“There is no need to worry,” Sonia says from behind her. “I do not anticipate to take up too much of your time.”

It’s a new room, but everyone has gravitated toward the same old configuration; the two seats up at the front where she and Sonia used to sit together are empty, just the same.

She takes her same seat, front and center. Peko slides into the desk behind her. It leaves two remaining empty desks in the classroom: Sonia’s normal one up at the front, and a second in the back next to Mitarai.

If Sonia hesitates, or even takes a second to consider her options, Natsumi doesn’t see it. She gathers her books against her chest and walks straight past her old desk to the back of the room. “Good morning, Mitarai-san,” Natsumi hears her say, with every bit of her usual morning chipperness. “Is this seat taken?”

The classroom is quiet. Saionji cranes her head from the seat on Natsumi’s other side to try and catch her eye. Mitarai stutters. “Uh, no. No, you can sit if you want.”

“Excellent!”

Natsumi keeps her eyes forward. She doesn’t realize she isn’t blinking until her eyes start to burn.

When class is over, no one lingers. Usually a handful of them will stay and blabber on until they’re nearly late for their next period, but today even Koizumi and her entourage slip out right at the bell. Yukizome makes an excuse about needing to drop by the office. Peko is the final one to leave, after Natsumi lifts one hand over her shoulder and waves her off.

Natsumi thinks about the empty gymnasium, yawning and oppressive.

Sonia waits until the door is all the way shut before she gets up. She moves back up to her old desk, and sits like she’s preparing for another class, hands folded on the desktop. She won’t look at Natsumi. She keeps her eyes trained on the smeared-but-empty blackboard.

“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me, Kuzuryuu-san,” she says. “My hope is that this can be productive for us both.”

Natsumi yawns. She has to force it. “Whatever,” she says, making sure to start the word before her yawn is all the way finished. “Just say what you came here to say. But can you at least be creative with your threats? All the standard ones get old fast, you know?”

Sonia’s mouth compresses into a thin line. “It is not that. I have no desire for retaliation against you or your clan. I have already resolved not to inform the rest of the Novoselic royal family of this incident.”

Natsumi catches herself playing with her pencil. She curls her fingers into a fist to get herself to stop; her father’s always said that her fidgeting was a tell. She weighs her words. “If you’re expecting me to say thank you for that,” she decides on, “you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“I would never expect that from you, Kuzuryuu-san.” Natsumi didn’t know Sonia had the capacity to be sardonic. “I only wish to understand. It took a significant amount of resources for you to acquire such… information in the first place, yes?”

“So?”

“So, I can only imagine you spent those resources in order to grant an advantage to yourself in our negotiations. There was an opportunity for you to do so.” Sonia looks over at her for the first time since that morning in the hall, but it’s only a flicker. It can’t have been intentional. “Why did you not? That is my only question.”

Natsumi manages to laugh. “That’s it?”

“Yes. That is it. It is a straightforward question to answer, is it not?”

Another flicker. It’s a weak point. Natsumi seizes it with both hands.

“You’re not gonna chew me out?” she asks. “Lecture me about my life choices? Tell me about how the bonds of friendship between women are sacred?” Sonia’s hands curl into fists on the desk. Natsumi leans far enough across the gap between their desks until she has to meet her eye dead-on. “Aren’t you _upset?_ ”

“Yes of _course_ I am upset!” Sonia says, nearly shouts, and her voice cracks under her sudden surge of volume. “I am angry, and- and _humiliated,_ and I cannot believe that you would still act like this after all that has happened!” Her eyes are shining. She blinks rapidly and sets her jaw. “But I also know in my heart that we _are_ friends. No matter how many times I imagine it, I cannot think of you as having malicious intent the entire time. So _please_ —”

Her tears are threatening to spill over. She composes herself with a deep, shuddering breath, and presses the edges of her fingers beneath her eyes. “Please,” she says again. Her voice is softer and steadier. “I wish to know why.”

Sonia will never fully trust her again. That’s a fact. Even if Natsumi spills the whole story right now, falls to her knees and begs forgiveness, all it will get her is a wary truce and a humiliating rumor about how the Kuzuryuu heir does her business.

She’s done. There’s no room for her to play around anymore.

She says, “We found something better.”

Sonia’s eyes are wide. “What?”

Natsumi tilts her head. “What, did you seriously believe you were our only option?” She counts to five in her head while Sonia blinks back at her, then lets a smile spread across her face. “Sheesh, you really think highly of that backwater country of yours, huh? Okay, let me spell it out for you.” She leans forward, and draws out each syllable, laboriously slow. “We. Didn’t. Need. You.”

“But—”

“But _what?_ I needed something for my practical exam, I had your tape on hand—” She mimics an explosion with her hands. “Done. You should be grateful I didn’t save it for later.”

“My exam time,” Sonia tries again. “It changed last minute, and I—”

“Komaeda-kun’s supposed to be lucky, isn’t he?” Natsumi shrugs. “Maybe you just got caught up in his creepy, lucky wake.”

Sonia’s mask has shattered; there are tears on her eyelashes and grooves in her forehead. Her voice is small. “Why are you being like this?”

“If you thought I was at this school for anything other than business, that’s your fault, not mine,” Natsumi says. “Can I go now?”

The silence settles, painful.

“I see,” Sonia says finally. She sniffles into her sleeve. “I believe I understand now. If this is the path you have chosen, Kuzuryuu-san, then I believe it is best for the both of us if our friendship ends here.” Her chair clatters when she stands up, and even she can’t hide the way her voice wobbles when she says, “Excuse me.”

Natsumi sits in the classroom long after it’s empty. It’s not until the bell for the start of the next period rings that she pulls herself out of the desk and out of the room.

Peko is waiting for her in the hall.

*

 **me**  
22:48  
sonia knows what i did, in case you care

 **me**  
22:48  
she says she won’t spill to her parents but like there’s anything actually stopping her

 **me**  
23:03  
don’t ignore me this is actually important

 **fuyu-chan**  
23:05  
what the fuck do you want me to do about it?

 **me**  
23:05  
i don’t know, figure something out with me?

 **me**  
23:05  
you know how many tanks they have, right?

 **fuyu-chan**  
23:08  
she’s your friend, you deal with it

 **fuyu-chan**  
23:08  
you didn’t drag me out here to help you with your social life

 **fuyu-chan**  
23:09  
unless you’ve got something for the clan, don’t fucking talk to me

 **me**  
23:09  
how is this not for the clan?

 **me**  
23:09  
do you WANT a whole country on our asses?

 **me**  
00:02  
fine

*

Peko’s phone starts to ping again after only a day or two. Natsumi thinks it must be happening more often than it used to, because she hears it all the time: during class, during lunch, in the hallway, at their lockers, in the dojo. 

(“Would you prefer I stopped responding?” Peko asks once, after the buzz of her phone on the desk interrupts Natsumi’s train of thought one too many times.

“No,” she answers. Her pencil tears the edge of her physics homework, and she has to pull out another sheet. “Not like I care.”

Peko stops anyway.)

Natsumi, for her part, gets tired of looking at an endless string of her own messages in the text conversation, so she stops. He’ll come around when he’s in a better mood; he always does. She plans on giving him the same cold shoulder he’s giving her until then.

It’s Thursday. Koizumi has brought lunch with her again for her bi-weekly trek to the west building. It’s wrapped in the same fabric as the last time Natsumi paid attention to it, with the rabbit design; she can see faint stains around the bottom edges. 

Saionji hangs off the edge of Koizumi’s desk, whining about how, “If I have to spend another lunch looking at Pig Barf’s stupid face I’m totally gonna have a mental breakdown!” Koizumi pats the back of her head, but she doesn’t budge on the issue. 

Natsumi’s never seen Satou come to the east building; it’s always been the other way around. Sometimes Koizumi brings the lunch, sometimes she doesn’t, but she’s always the one making the walk, and she’s almost always late for class the period after. Natsumi assumed she’d get tired of it after the first few weeks, but it’s going on a year now and they haven’t missed a day.

She stares at the cutesy rabbits on the side of Koizumi’s lunchbox, and thinks she knows how to get her brother in a better mood faster. She tilts her head back. “Hey, Peko-chan.”

“Yes.”

“Go have lunch with my brother today.”

Peko doesn’t answer right away. When Natsumi twists around in her seat to look at her, she’s frowning, her brow pinched.

Natsumi drapes both arms over the back of her chair, and sets her cheek against her elbow. “What? You don’t want to?”

“I—” It isn’t often Peko gets tongue-tied. She’s so pale that it makes it easier to see where the blush stands out against her cheeks. “No, it does sound… enjoyable, but…” It takes her several seconds too long to be believable, but once she finds her excuse, she latches onto it. “It’s still the early days of the school year. Shouldn’t I be seen eating with you?”

“Oh, please. I’ll be fine for one day. These chumps should know better than to mess with me by now. And if they don’t, I can reteach them myself.” Souda glares at her from the back of the room. Natsumi wiggles her fingers at him, smile big. “You should do it! What’s stopping you, huh?”

Peko hesitates. Her eyes drop down to her desk. “I don’t think I’m someone Fuyuhiko-sama wants to see right now,” she admits, fingers curled into the desktop.

“Yeah, that’s literally never been true.” Peko still looks uncertain. Natsumi feels a thin bubble of frustration gather in her gut. “At least he’s talking to _you._ ”

“Young mistress, I—”

The bubble bursts. “Are you saying you won’t do it?” she interrupts, sitting up.

Peko’s turn around is instantaneous. Her chin drops to her chest, her hands in her lap. “No. Of course not. If that’s what you wish, young mistress, I’ll go after class. Should I announce myself to Fuyuhiko-sama before I arrive?”

Natsumi turns back around in her seat. She eyes her phone, laying face-up on her desk. (The screen is still jagged and broken; her father had refused to have it replaced before she left for school, citing her string of other broken phones.) Last she counted, all eight of the most recent messages in her text conversation with her brother had been from her.

“No,” she decides. “It can be a surprise. And don’t tell him it was my idea, okay?”

“Yes, young mistress."

*

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:12  
seriously?

 **me**  
12:16  
what?

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:16  
you know exactly what

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:16  
this is low even for you

 **me**  
12:16  
excuse me for thinking you’d want a friendly face with you at lunch

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:18  
don’t give me that bullshit. what the fuck is wrong with you?

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:18  
you can’t just throw her at every single problem you have

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:19  
did you seriously think this was going to make me LESS pissed at you?

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:19  
after all the other shit you’ve pulled?

*

“Wuh-oh. I know _that_ face. Which is it, deadbeat or baby daddy?”

She’s in the dining hall, eating lunch by herself at her and Peko’s usual table. When she looks up from her phone, ready to fling it at whoever felt the need to butt in, there’s a freshman girl sitting on her table at the far end, her feet on the bench, slurping on the straw of a pale green shake. 

She’s completely ditched the school uniform for her own outfit, all bright colors and provocative lines. There’s a cute bear pin in her hair. She smiles when Natsumi glares up at her. “Who the hell are you?”

Her name is Enoshima Junko, from the 78th class. Natsumi knows all of them; she looked them up one-by-one when their names started cropping up on the message boards. Enoshima had been the sole exception: her fashion blog is massive and critically-acclaimed, and Natsumi has been a follower since she was in middle school.

But she has a reputation to maintain, and that doesn’t include letting any freshman who feels like it sidle up to her lunch table.

Enoshima slides down to sit across from her on the bench. She wraps both hands around her shake; it must be kale, Natsumi remembers her posting about it before school started. “You don’t know me? Well, that’s okay. Because I know _you,_ Natsumi-senpai.” She holds her straw between her teeth when she smiles. “And there’s plenty of time left for us to get acquainted.”

“There’s forty minutes left in lunch,” Natsumi tells her. “You’ve got three.”

Enoshima pretends to shake her sleeve back to check her wrist. She isn’t wearing a watch. In May she’d posted about her favorite types of accessories, and watches hadn’t even made the list. “Hmmm. I bet I can make that work. I mean, it’s not like it’s much of a story, right?” She laughs, right in Natsumi’s face. She doesn’t even bother to try to hold it in. “You’re the junior who totally screwed the pooch on her practical exam!”

Natsumi grinds both fists down into the table. She doesn’t have to take this, especially not from some air-headed freshman. She makes to stand, but Enoshima waves her down, one-handed. “Hey, hey, hey. Don’t worry about it! Those judges just didn’t get you.” She leans forward on both elbows, and her voice dips into a lower register. “But I get you.” 

Natsumi sneers. She lowers herself back down to sitting. “What, some little freshman with bows on her jacket?” she says. “I don’t think so.”

Enoshima doesn’t flinch. She just keeps on talking, with that same, gravelly quality to her voice. “Sure,” she says. “I mean, it wasn’t _just_ about the recording, right? It was about where you got it from, too. How the school had a perv on their payroll, waltzing around their precious Ultimates, and how _you_ plucked it out from under their noses. How you could’ve taken down an entire country, because of _their mistake._ You could’ve just as easily used it on them as you could have on Sonia-senpai, right? Who in their right mind would want people like _that_ watching out for the purest distillation of talent in the world? That’s what you thought was gonna guarantee you that sweet, sweet perfect score.”

Natsumi hasn’t told anyone that. Not Peko, not Fuyuhiko, no one.

“It didn’t go the way you wanted,” Enoshima goes on. Her eyes are bright. “You made one big mistake, senpai.”

Natsumi’s phone buzzes on the table. She claps her hand over top of it. The broken pieces of the screen jab into the edge of her palm.

Enoshima doesn’t look away from her face. She’s grinning when she says, “You gonna get that? It could be fate, sending you the eggplant emoji you’ve been dreaming of.”

“It’s my brother.” Natsumi doesn’t need to look.

“Ooh, even better. Talk about a _scandal,_ am I right?”

“What do you mean?” Natsumi interrupts. “What _mistake?_ ”

“Well, isn’t it obvious?” Enoshima’s shake is almost empty. It gurgles loudly when she sucks on the straw. “You let them off too easy! _You’re_ still assuming they respect your talent more than they want to keep you under their thumb.” She shrugs. “You threatened them, so they had to teach you a lesson.”

Natsumi means to make her lip curl, to make her uncertainty look like disdain, but it only feels like a grimace. “If they know anything about me, they know that’s a stupid move,” she says. “My family doesn’t stand for that.”

“And what do you think they’ll say if you do anything about it?” Enoshima sits up straight, and adjusts imaginary glasses on her face. Her impression of Fat Nose is unnervingly spot-on. “Hmhm, yes. It’s always disappointing to let a talented student go, but Kuzuryuu-kun was clearly not equipped to handle the rigors of our institution. This is nothing more than thinly-veiled retaliation for our panel’s assessment of her abilities. A shame that such a promising young woman would have such drastic faults of character.” She sheds the persona like a jacket flung into a corner, shoulders dropping and head lolling back dramatically. “Come _on._ Who d’you think the press is gonna side with on _that_ one? Huh?”

She waits, her eyes big and expectant. She cups one hand around her ear. Natsumi glowers at her.

“Think about it. The word _I’ve_ heard around town is that the Kuzuryuu siblings are a force to be reckoned with, you know? Hardly anybody drops your name without Fuyuhiko-kun’s right behind it.” Enoshima points the chewed straw of her shake at Natsumi’s phone. “But the scouting board, in all their cherry-picking wisdom, thinks he’s only good for the trash heap? Does that make sense to you?”

Natsumi lifts her hand. The new messages blink up at her from her phone’s lock screen.

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:22  
this is between YOU and ME

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:22  
or are you too much of a fucking coward to come talk to me yourself?

“Whomp,” Enoshima chirps. “Time’s up! Food for thought, Natsumi-senpai.” She slaps both hands on the table when she gets up. “And by the way,” she adds, “thanks for following! Meeting a longtime reader always touches me deep down in my special place.” She holds her hands in front of her chest, fingers curled together in a heart. “Talk to you later, bitch.”

*

Natsumi makes the walk to the west building before the end of the lunch period. There’s time enough left, and she doesn’t feel like sitting alone at that table with nothing on her tray. Her brother wants her to come talk to him, she’ll do it.

It would be easy for someone to mistake the west building for a nice one, if they’d never been inside the east building. The tuition money doesn’t go to waste, even if most of it must funnel into the main course: the interior decoration is nice, just not as classy as the main course; there are amenities, just not as many as the main course; the furniture and equipment look like they were handed down when they got too much wear in the main course.

The west building doesn’t have a dedicated dining hall the way the east building does; Natsumi can see some students eating at their desks through classroom windows, and others loitering in groups around the halls. That’s where she finds them: Peko and her brother and a kid she’s never seen before, clustered together outside the open door of one of the classrooms. Fuyuhiko leans against the wall with his arms crossed while the kid talks with both hands.

The reserve course uniform doesn’t suit him. The jacket is too boxy, and sits awkwardly on his shoulders even after it’s been tailored to fit him better. It makes him look smaller than he is, his torso drowning in dark fabric. He hates it, she can tell; he keeps fidgeting with it, plucking at the elbows and tugging on the hem.

Peko looks her way first. She steps toward her, away from Fuyuhiko’s shoulder, and that’s what tilts his head in her direction, too. Natsumi’s already braced for the worst of his anger or disgust or whatever else.

Their eyes meet, and he looks away, like he can’t even stand the sight of her.

The kid, on the other hand, is staring at her. He watches her walk up with big, nervous eyes, and he keeps looking at her even when her brother is determined to glare a hole in the door on the opposite side of the hall.

“Well?” she demands. 

The kid flinches. Fuyuhiko decides to glare at the ceiling.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Natsumi?”

“Are you joking?” When he doesn’t answer, she slaps her hand on the wall next to his head. That gets him to look at her, at least. “ _You_ said I should come, dumbass!”

“Yeah, I didn’t mean right this fucking second!” Some of the other students are starting to glance their way. The kid looks uncomfortable, like he wants to bolt but isn’t sure if he can. “What the hell do you want?”

“I _want_ to know when this stupid tantrum of yours is gonna be done.”

“ _Tantrum?_ ” He stands up straight, lunges into her space. “Are you fucking serious right now? I’m—”

Students are starting to trickle out of homeroom and disperse to their afternoon classes. Natsumi spots the bright bob of Koizumi’s hair out of the corner of her eye first, but it’s Satou who stops in the doorway, hand on the frame.

Her eyes are narrow and suspicious. “I thought that was you,” she says. “Can’t you go anywhere without causing trouble, Natsumi?”

“Look who it is,” Natsumi jeers, loud enough that the students past Satou’s shoulder lift their heads. “Hey, Satou-san, how about you keep your nose in the dirt where it belongs? And _out_ of my business?”

Koizumi elbows her way around Satou’s shoulder. “Hey! You can’t just talk to people like that. What did you even come down here for, huh?”

“Last I checked you weren’t part of this conversation either, Koizumi-san!” Natsumi snaps. “So get lost before I do it for you.”

“Fuck this,” Fuyuhiko interrupts. “I'm leaving. Some of us actually have class to go to.” His shoulder collides with hers when he shoves himself off the wall. “Later, Hinata. Bye, Peko.”

“You’re gonna have to talk to me eventually!” Natsumi shouts after him, but he’s already been swallowed by the surge of students from the other classrooms. Satou bumps into her when she passes, too, Koizumi’s hand at her elbow.

The kid is the only one left behind. He's got a deer-in-headlights look to him. “Um,” he says. “You're Kuzuryuu’s sister, right?”

Natsumi glares at him.

“Just because, you look kind of— I mean, you can tell you're related.”

She looks at Peko. “Who the hell is this guy?”

“Hinata Hajime,” Peko replies. “Fuyuhiko-sama brought him to lunch.”

“Uh. Yeah,” the kid says. He looks at Peko sideways. “I just met Pekoyama today. Your brother and I are… Friends? I guess?”

“You _guess?_ ”

“I mean.” Hinata gestures vaguely in Fuyuhiko’s wake. “We talk sometimes. I don’t know if he’d call us friends, though.”

Natsumi lifts her chin. “If you’re not sure, then he wouldn’t,” she tells him. “Remember that. Come on, Peko-chan."

“Wait,” Hinata says. “Kuzuryuu-san. I know it’s not any of my business, but—”

She rounds on him, and relishes the way he recoils, eyes big. “You’re right. It’s _not_ any of your business. You think I give a crap what some talentless hack thinks of me?”

Hinata’s eyes narrow. It might be the first sign of a spine she’s seen from him since she showed up. “Your brother goes here,” he says. “Is he a talentless hack to you, too?”

Whatever. Slim spines crack easier.

She grabs him by the knot of his tie, and digs her nails in so that he doesn’t slip out of her grip when he jerks his head back. He swallows his yelp, and his face goes ashen; she can feel the way his pulse jumps against her knuckles. “It’s Hinata-kun, right?” He stares at her, and she drags him down to her level. “ _Right?_ ” He nods. She smiles. “All right. Listen up, Hinata-kun. My brother is only stuck in this dump because Hope’s Peak is too afraid of what we’d do if they scouted the both of us. He doesn’t belong in here with trash like you, understand? And once I’m done, he won’t be. So you can be friends with him _you guess_ as long as you want, but don’t think for one _second_ that puts you on the same level as us.”

The bell rings for the next period. Natsumi shoves him when she lets him go, and he stumbles, hands at his collar.

“Come on, Peko-chan,” she says again, turning on her heel. “It’s time for class.”

*

 **me**  
07:53  
we have to talk about this

 **me**  
08:12  
i’m serious

 **me**  
08:13  
do you want being here to be a complete waste of time?

 **me**  
08:13  
because that’s what you’re doing right now

 **me**  
10:44  
can you just talk to me like a grownup?

 **me**  
10:44  
or are you just totally physically incapable?

 **me**  
13:28  
i don’t know what else you want from me

 **me**  
13:28  
i’m trying, okay

 **me**  
13:30  
does sitting there ignoring all my messages make you feel better?

 **me**  
14:03  
hey

 **me**  
14:03  
hey

 **me**  
14:03  
hey

 **me**  
14:22  
i can’t fucking believe you sometimes

 **me**  
14:22  
you’re such a fucking baby

 **me**  
15:42  
WHAT

 **me**  
15:42  
DO

 **me**  
15:42  
YOU

 **me**  
15:42  
WANT

 **me**  
15:42  
FROM

 **me**  
15:42  
ME

 **me**  
15:42  
???????????

 **me**  
16:35  
are you going to do this all year?

 **me**  
18:19  
will you please just answer me one time

 **me**  
01:57  
you know what? fuck you

 **me**  
02:02  
i don’t need your help anyway

*

She sends Peko back to the west building a week later, this time with a message and clear instructions to make her brother listen to every word. Natsumi spends the lunch period alone in their new homeroom, and waits for her phone to go off.

She doesn’t have to wait long. She could probably time Peko’s trip across the courtyards just using the timestamp on her brother’s responses.

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:07  
are you fucking serious?

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:07  
I told you to STOP

 **me**  
12:07  
what else was i supposed to do??

 **me**  
12:07  
she’s the only one you bother talking to anymore

 **me**  
12:07  
should i handwrite a letter and send it through your new bff hinata-kun?

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:10  
for fuck’s sake

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:10  
I can’t believe you’re still this fucking selfish

 **me**  
12:10  
I’M the selfish one? ME??

 **me**  
12:10  
you’re not even TRYING to listen

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:10  
listen to what? some sob story about how this isn’t really your fault?

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:10  
I’m not about to let you pull this manipulative bullshit on me

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:11  
I have nothing to fucking say to you. ever

 **fuyu-chan**  
12:11  
so FUCK OFF

The message blurs. It takes her a second to realize that it’s her eyes and not her phone, hot tears catching on her eyelashes. She drops the phone on the desk with a clatter and presses both hands over her face. 

On the other side of the room, the open door of the classroom clicks quietly shut.

Fuck, she lost track of the days, _fuck._ It’s Thursday. “Get lost, Koizumi-san!” she says, too loud. “Nobody said you could come in here!” She turns her face toward the wall and scrubs her sleeve across her eyes until they burn.

Koizumi doesn’t leave. Her shoes are quiet on the classroom’s linoleum floor, but Natsumi can still hear her milling around behind her. Eventually she sits on the edge of one of the desks behind Natsumi’s shoulder and asks, “Why are you crying?”

“I said, _get lost._ ”

Koizumi draws air between her teeth, a disdainful, judgmental sound that’s been grating on Natsumi’s nerves since they were thirteen. 

“I heard about your fight with Sonia-chan,” Koizumi says. She stands up, and sets something on the desk she was sitting on. It’s her lunchbox, when Natsumi glances at it; the fabric it’s wrapped in is blue today, with a smiling cloud design on it. “She won’t tell any of us what it was about.” She waits. Natsumi doesn’t say anything. “Is Peko-chan not going to eat with you today, either?” 

Natsumi presses the heels of both hands into her eyes until she sees spots. She means to sigh, annoyed, but it just comes out as a long exhale. “What do you care?” 

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” Koizumi says. She unties the top of her lunch. “I don’t feel bad for you. Whatever happened, I’d bet money that you brought it on yourself.” She takes out a single homemade meat bun and sets it on a napkin next to Natsumi’s knee. “But you have to have lunch. So stop being stubborn and just eat something.” 

Natsumi ignores it. 

“Come on,” Koizumi says again, once the silence gets to her. Her voice is softer. “This isn’t healthy. Yukizome-sensei is worried about you, you know?” She picks the meatbun back up and holds it under Natsumi’s nose. “You’ll feel better after you eat something, Natsumi-chan.” 

Before she’s even recognized what she’s doing, Natsumi has Koizumi by the wrist. The meat bun tumbles out of her hand and onto the floor with a wet, thick sound. “You want to talk about what’s gonna make me feel _better,_ Koizumi-san?” 

Koizumi draws in a quick, frightened breath. She tries to pull her hand away, but Natsumi twists her wrist to pinch her skin and drag her forward, until they’re at eye level. “‘Cause I’ll tell you,” she says. “It’s not your charity. It’s not your _pity._ You want to congratulate yourself for _alllll_ your good deeds, fine, but don’t foist them off on me like I’m one of your stupid _pet projects._ I look out for me, understand? I don’t need shit from you.” 

Natsumi lets her go. Koizumi falls away from her until she runs into one of the desks behind her; the feet screech when it drags against the floor. She has her arm cradled against her stomach, the skin around her wrist angry and red. 

Koizumi stays like that, braced against the jostled desk, breathing hard. “I only wanted to be your friend,” she says eventually, her voice trembling. “Back then. You’re the one who made it like this.” 

She doesn’t take the time to retie the knot on her lunch before she stumbles out the door. 

* 

**enoshima junko**  
12:16  
what’s up bitch!! 

**enoshima junko**  
12:16  
skip physics and come shopping with me 

**enoshima junko**  
12:16  
there’s a pair of stiletto boots with your name ALL over them 

* 

**peko**  
13:07  
Will you not be attending class this afternoon? 

**fuyu-chan**  
13:29  
where the hell are you? 

**fuyu-chan**  
13:30  
peko says she hasn’t seen you since lunch 

**fuyu-chan**  
13:36  
seriously natsumi don’t fucking start with this 

* 

Enoshima takes her to a tiny boutique wedged above a bakery. There’s no sign, inside or outside, and the walls of the stairwell are white and sparse. “Hisakawa and me go waaaaay back,” she explains, hips swaying on the staircase. “Trust me, you’re gonna love everything about her.” 

But once they get inside, there’s only a bored-looking receptionist with a headset behind the front desk; he shoves a small clipboard toward them without looking up. Enoshima reaches past it to set her hand against his forearm, red nails bright against his dress shirt. “I should already be on the list.” 

The receptionist jerks in his seat. He doesn’t recover well, expression tight when he turns to look at them. “Enoshima-san,” he says. “Welcome back. Hisakawa-san was expecting you.” His eyes slide to Natsumi. “Who’s your friend?” 

“Kuzuryuu,” Natsumi answers. 

The receptionist swallows. He stands from his desk, limbs stiff. “Of course. We were expecting you as well, Kuzuryuu-san. Come with me.” 

“Don’t worry about Maeda,” Enoshima chirps, while he leads them back through the various show rooms. She doesn’t lower her voice. “He’s got a stick up his butt a mile long, but he’s all right.” 

“Expecting me, huh?” Natsumi says, craning her neck to get a better look at one of the racks against the wall. 

Enoshima grins at her. “Sure! I told them you were coming. What’re friends for, right, senpai?” 

Maeda leads them all the way to a small room at the back of the store, then hovers just outside the door. The sofas are wider than the ones out front, with fatter cushions, and there’s a semicircle of matcha cookies laid out on a plate next to a pot of still-steaming tea. The room is flanked on both sides by massive racks of clothes, all at the high knife-edge of fashion, and all very, very expensive. 

Enoshima dives toward one of the racks and throws a pair of tall black boots back at her. They have gold buckles and a skinny heel, and they’re exactly in Natsumi’s size. “Put those on!” she barks. She drapes herself back across one of the sofas and plucks one of the cookies from the plate. “Maeda back there is gonna be _begging_ for you to step on him by the time we’re through.” 

“If you could keep your voices down,” Maeda says behind them. 

Natsumi sits on the opposite sofa, and drops her bag on the floor beside her. “So,” she says. “Cut the crap. Why’d you bring me here?” She bends down to toe the boots on. They’re well-made, and heavy in her hands. “It wasn’t just to show me these.” 

“Well, it was at least, like, thirty percent to show you those. I mean, look at them, right?” Enoshima pillows her arms behind her head. “The rest, I just figured girls like you and me should stick together, you know?” 

Natsumi scoffs. “‘You and me’?” Her ankles wobble when she stands up; the heels are taller than she’s used to. “That’s a good one. _You and me_ nothing.” 

She meets Enoshima’s eye through the big full-body mirror, but she only smiles back. “Did you know Hisakawa has six other little boutiques like this in the city?” Enoshima asks. She snaps another cookie between her teeth. “And that’s just _here._ A designer like that has a lot of connections. And she has to do a lot to make ends meet.” 

“What are you trying to say?” 

“ _I’m_ not saying anything. I’m just the go-between! The introduction. I’ve got an old friend in need of a loan and a new one who might be able to help her out.” Enoshima’s eyes rake up and down her body, evaluative. “We need to get you into something else,” she decides. “Those boots in that outfit make you look like the centerfold of a bad porno mag.” 

She’s right. The boots clash oddly with her school uniform; they make her look like a little kid with questionable ideas of what an adult dresses like. Natsumi steps to the rack and snaps through choices. “Well, you can keep it to yourself,” she says. “My family doesn’t need any help selling loans.” 

“Maybe not,” Enoshima says. “But _you_ need momentum, am I right? Some resources? Friends in high places?” When Natsumi looks back over her shoulder at her, she laughs. “What do you think the fashion industry _is,_ Natsumi-senpai?” 

Natsumi pulls a dress from somewhere in the middle of the rack: black, with a high neckline and an image of a dragon winding up the left side, scales in shining gold leaf. “Don’t know,” she answers. “Don’t care.” 

“Well, that’s okay,” Enoshima says, her smile sharp-edged. “I’ll just talk to myself! I love this stuff, you know. In case you hadn’t heard.” 

Natsumi goes into the dressing room, and Enoshima does talk to herself. She tells herself all about Hisakawa: her history, her money troubles, her track record in the underbelly of Japan’s fashion world. By the time Natsumi has the dress over her head, she has to admit: it doesn’t sound like a bad deal. 

When she comes back out, Enoshima whistles and drags her in front of the full-body mirror by the elbow. Her fingers are cold when she zips the dress the rest of the way up. “I like it,” she says. “Now this is the centerfold of a _good_ porno mag, am I right?” 

Natsumi skims her hands down her hips to smooth the fabric against her skin. It’s a better look with the heels than her school uniform. It’s a better look all around. She doesn’t feel like a little girl playing dress up, the way she always did wearing the elaborate kimonos her mother bought for her. She feels like herself, but better. Powerful. Intimidating. 

Enoshima lingers behind her. She smooths her hands around Natsumi’s ribcage and plucks at pleats to give them more volume. “You know what I think, senpai?” she asks, her chin on Natsumi’s shoulder. She smiles at the mirror. “I think you’re gonna revolutionize the whole genre. Those old onna-oyabun tropes are _so_ last century. You’re gonna give it some life. Some _edge._ ” She draws Natsumi’s hair between her fingers and twists it into a high bun, tight enough to pinch her scalp. She pierces it with a pin at just the right angle to keep it secure without making it uncomfortable. “A new sense of scary-but-sexy style.” 

Natsumi tilts her chin at herself in the mirror the way her father always does at the junior members when he dismisses them. 

“Ooh, chilly.” Enoshima says, cheerful. “Bingo! Looks like we have a winner!” 

Natsumi feels around the hem of the dress for the price tag, but Enoshima’s fingers clasp over hers before she can read it. The tips of her nails are sharp against the back of her hand. “Hey, hey, hey,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.” She twists her wrist to rip the tag off. “Just take it! Who else is gonna be able to pull of the metallic golden dragon look anyway, huh?“ 

Natsumi looks back over her shoulder, but Maeda hasn’t moved. He has two fingers against the earpiece of his headset, and he’s talking rapidly to someone about the cost of purple silk. “What,” she says, already rolling her eyes, “ _you’re_ going to pay for it?” 

Her hands still linger on the collar of the dress despite herself, fine fabric shifting beneath her fingers. She doesn’t want to take it off. She doesn’t want to lose the feeling she has now, like her mistakes are all behind her and the future is at her fingertips. 

Enoshima snorts. “No way! Hisakawa owes me a favor for saving her last show. Think of it as a gift, from her to me to you.” She slides one arm around Natsumi’s shoulders. “To celebrate a bright new partnership.” 

Natsumi wears the dress and the shoes out of the store. 

* 

**me**  
14:56  
i’m on my way back now 

**me**  
14:56  
wait for me outside the dorm 

**peko**  
14:56  
Yes, young mistress. 

* 

Peko’s expression is pinched and tight when Natsumi sees her next. (Outside the dorm, as promised.) She steps forward when she sees her, relief smoothing out the lines. 

“Welcome back, young mistress,” she says. Natsumi doesn’t break stride. Peko takes the cue to fall into step beside her. “Is something the matter?” 

“Nope,” Natsumi answers. “We’re going to get my brother.” 

Peko’s steps don’t hesitate, but she does look back over her shoulder, at the retreating dorm behind them. “Fuyuhiko-sama was—” She pauses, considers, chooses her words. “Agitated, when I saw him last. I don’t know if—” 

“Too bad for him!” Natsumi’s heart is beating fast. The west building is too damn far. “Come _on,_ pick up the pace!” 

Peko doesn’t argue anymore. It’s late in the day; students must have already started scattering to their different clubs, but Natsumi knows her brother’s schedule, and she knows she’ll find him when he comes out of the main building. 

Once he does, they’re settling this. 

There are more students than Natsumi expects lingering on the front steps of the building, but it is the reserve course. Maybe they just have less to do. One of them is Satou, sitting at the base of the steps with a handful of friends who aren't Koizumi, who Natsumi's impressed exist at all. 

Satou doesn’t see her, at first. But reserve course students always murmur among themselves when a main course student shows up on the steps of the west building, so it hardly takes any time at all. One of her friends points past her shoulder, and her head turns. 

In the next moment, she’s on her feet. Natsumi lets her come, arms crossed and smile lazy, but Satou doesn’t stop when she’s within shouting distance. She charges straight at her, hand grasping blindly for her shoulder, and Peko has to shove her arm between them to shake her off. Satou at least knows enough not to swing at Peko; she only jerks her arm away and retreats a few steps like a dumb, injured dog. 

“Hey!” Natsumi snaps. “Hands off! What the hell is your problem?” 

Satou doesn’t back down. “ _My_ problem?” she shouts. Every head in the courtyard turns towards them. “ _You!_ It’s always you! Nothing gives you the right to treat people the way you do, Natsumi. You’re disgusting. You’re the _worst._ I can’t believe you’d even show your _face_ here.” 

“Ohhhh.” Natsumi rolls her eyes high, with her entire head. “I get it. Is this about Koizumi-san? Did she go crying to you again? Why am I not surprised?” 

“I don’t know why she even still bothers trying to help you. You’re a lost cause. I don’t think you even have a heart at all.” 

Students are starting to circle around them. None of the reserve course students have the guts to interrupt, not with Peko already grasping her shinai with one hand, but they watch, drawn in like bugs to a lantern. Fuyuhiko is one of them; he’s lingering at the top of the steps, Hinata behind him. Natsumi can see him past Satou’s shoulder, watching her. 

“What do you know about it, huh?” she says. “Did you know you’re one of her little projects, too?” Satou scoffs, arms crossed. “No? You only talk to her, what, twice a week? That’s right, isn’t it? That’s about how often she decides she feels like _gracing_ you with her presence? Do you think it makes her feel better about herself, sharing her talent with you wastes of space? Does she give herself brownie points for being the guiding light in your piss poor excuse for a life?” 

Satou is glaring at her, but her cheeks are red. She doesn’t say anything, and Natsumi laughs in her face. “That’s what I thought. How does it feel, knowing you’ll never amount to anything other than a leech hanging off the back of Koizumi-san’s skirt?” 

“They should’ve expelled you,” Satou spits. “You’re an embarrassment to Hope’s Peak.” 

The other students gasp. Some of them start to whisper. Others laugh nervously. Natsumi isn’t sure how many or how loudly; her ears are ringing and her skin is cold, and the smug look on Satou’s face sets off something sour in her gut. 

“Hey!” Her brother lunges to the front of the gathered crowd, elbow in the ribcage of some tittering girl, and Hinata has to catch him at the chest before he breaks the line. “The fuck did you just say to my sister, bitch?” 

“Kuzuryuu— Hang on, calm down—” 

“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down when this _bitch_ is over here running her goddamn _mouth_ —” 

Satou keeps talking. She’s always been taller and broader than Natsumi; when Satou presses into her space, she looms. “You’re not talented. You’re a _bully._ That’s the only reason you’re still around. Watase-sensei and the other judges knew what a fraud you were, and look how you treated them! You don’t deserve to be in the main course with Mahiru!” 

Natsumi’s had enough. 

She hits Satou across the face, somewhere between a slap and a punch, the edges of her knuckles colliding with Satou’s cheekbone. The impact reverberates through the courtyard; it's hard enough to send Satou to the concrete. The shot of pain up it sends up the length of Natsumi’s arm expands in her chest as a full, giddy feeling, and rises straight up to her head. 

A handful of overdramatic students scream, and the rest scatter like frightened birds. 

It’s Natsumi’s turn to loom. Satou is holding both hands against her face when Natsumi steps over her, and they drop when Natsumi steps _on_ her, shoe against her collarbone. There’s a bright slash of red along her cheek where the edge of Natsumi’s nail dug too deep.

She has to keep her ankle at a precise angle to keep the sharp point of her heel from digging too deeply into Satou’s chest. Natsumi can admire it even better at this angle, where it draws a dark smear of dirt across Satou’s white blouse. 

“I think we need to have a chat, Satou-san,” Natsumi says. She keeps her voice high and delicate, and keeps a smile on her face. “Since you obviously didn’t hear me the first time. Which is funny, because I thought I was pretty clear, you know?” The ring of students around them is silent. “But maybe you’re just too stupid to get it. That’s fine. I’ll say it one more time, since we’re old friends, and this time I’ll even use small words.” 

She leans down until all her weight is on the ball of her right foot. She can feel the way the cartilage in Satou’s shoulder strains under the pressure. 

“My business is _my_ business. Not yours. Not Koizumi-san’s. So you don’t need to concern yourself with it, okay? I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear you. I don’t want to hear _about_ you. Ever.” The setting sun is warm against her back. It dumps her shadow over Satou’s trembling face. “We’re not going to have this conversation again. Understand?” 

Satou’s chest heaves. Natsumi leans over her. “Sorry, Satou-san, I really need to be sure you get it this time, you know? I said—” She drives her heel down. “— _do you understand?_ ” 

Satou scrabbles at the back of Natsumi’s heel, trying to relieve the pressure. Her chin jerks, intentional or not. 

Natsumi lifts her weight up. She laughs when Satou scrambles away from her, tights tearing on the dirty concrete, and puts both hands on her hips. “Good enough! Glad we could get that settled, huh?” She tilts her head back. “Peko-chan, we’re leaving.” 

“Yes, young mistress.” 

She looks at her brother, where he's shoved his way to the front of the mass of students, Hinata’s hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t have the same wide-eyed, dumbfounded expression as the others, but she has trouble reading the expression he _does_ have, his mouth thin and his brow creased. “Well?” she asks. 

He rolls his shoulder to shake off Hinata’s hand. He nods at her, a shallow dip of his chin, and when she walks away the two of them are behind her, Fuyuhiko at her right shoulder and Peko at her left. 


	6. Chapter 6

“I’m still fucking pissed at you,” Fuyuhiko says, when they get back to her dorm room. “Don’t forget that.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She sits on the bed, and sets to work twisting her boots off her feet. Her arches are starting to ache. “Like I _could_ ever forget, since you won’t shut up about it.”

She waits for him to snap at her, or shout, or try to stomp out of the room. Natsumi won’t let him leave; they’re settling this here and now, whether he likes it or not. She makes eye contact with Peko on the other side of the room, and she bows her head, message heard.

But Fuyuhiko doesn’t reach for the doorknob. He stays where he is, against the wall with his arms crossed over his middle, and he sighs, bone-deep.

Irritation prickles at her. Where does he get off, acting like he’s the one that’s been so put-upon here? After she’s spent weeks chasing him down, trying to make it right?

He says, “What are you doing, Natsumi?”

“I’m _trying_ to get you to sit down and talk to me,” she answers, “in case you haven’t gotten, I dunno, _any_ of the eight trillion messages I sent you.”

“I’m not talking about that.”

“Of course you’re not,” she mutters, and yanks her other shoe off too hard. It pinches a nerve in her ankle that sends a shot of pain all the way up to her hip. 

He ignores her. “I’m _talking_ about whatever the hell that was with Satou back there.”

“What about it?”

Whatever response he was expecting from her, that apparently wasn’t it. She stares at him, steady, while he searches for words. “It was a lot,” he says finally. “Even for you.”

“It was _effective,_ ” she corrects. She reaches one arm out towards her desk, where her laptop is sitting. Peko steps forward to pass it to her, and Fuyuhiko tracks her with his eyes. “What? Are you seriously going to side with Satou now?”

“Satou’s a bitch,” he snaps. “Don’t put words in my mouth.” She opens her computer in her lap, and sees him scowl in her periphery. “Hey! What the hell? I’m fucking talking to you.”

“Yeah, talking about stupid shit that doesn’t matter! Let me know when you fall off your high horse, I’m gonna be shopping for a new phone.”

“Dad said he wasn’t buying you a new one.”

“Well, good thing Dad’s not here then, huh?”

“So that’s it then?” She ignores him, and types what she’s looking for into the search bar. She wants something slim and pretty and expensive. “You can do whatever the hell you feel like, but fuck everybody else and what they want?”

She rolls her eyes. “There it is,” she says. She doesn’t look up from her keyboard. “You’re so melodramatic, you know that? I did it as much for you as I did for me.”

“That’s the biggest load of horseshit I’ve ever heard in my life. In what fucking universe would _this_ be what _I_ want?”

“Oh, please. If you had your way, you’d be happy to sit in the background for the rest of your life, letting everybody else take the credit until nobody even remembers your name.”

“Don’t you fucking dare—”

“Would you have told them?” she demands, loud enough to drown him out. She looks at him now, over the edge of her screen. The phone model she’s looking at is jet black, all curved lines and metal edges. “After all that work we did, after all that shit you had to go through, if Mom and Dad had asked, would you have told them about any of it? Would you have told them that all of it would’ve gone under if you hadn’t helped me?”

He doesn’t say anything, and that’s answer enough. She tosses up both hands. “Yeah. So save the speech, okay? I’m sick of hearing it from you.”

“Even if that is true,” he says. “What in the _fuck_ gives you the right to make that decision for me?”

“We were _supposed_ to work together.” He rolls his eyes hard enough that the back of his head bounces against the wall. “I thought you’d at least trust me enough to talk to me before flipping out like this.”

“Trust _you?_ You didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go along with this dumbass plan of yours! How the fuck am I supposed to trust you?”

Her throat sticks. It hurts when she swallows around it. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, which is nothing at all like the speech she’d already had planned out in her head. “Okay?”

He looks up at her. His eyes are wary, but at least not angry, which is as much progress as she’s gotten in weeks. She’ll take it.

“I should’ve said something to you,” she says. “But be honest. Would you have said yes if I did?”

He only says, “No.”

“Exactly. You’re not some big man of mystery, you know. You’re just my little brother.” He glares at her, but it’s more what she’s used to. It’s built out of irritation and pettiness, not hatred. “I have to make up for everything I fucked up last year. I have to do all that _and_ do triple as well on my practical exam to shut up any of those fucking judges who don’t think I’m worthwhile. I need your help. I need you _here._ ” She feels the corners of her eyes start to sting. She takes a quick breath, and focuses again on her laptop screen. “I wasn’t bullshitting you when I said we were supposed to work together.” 

Peko has been silent this entire time. She’s still silent now, but she’s not staring resolutely at the back wall anymore, determined to be a piece of furniture, oblivious to their shouting match. She watches Fuyuhiko while he thinks.

“Fine,” he says finally.

“Fine, you’ll help?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Natsumi feels something in her chest start to loosen. “ _But,_ ” he goes on, “if we’re making a decision, _we_ make the decision. Got it? I’m not putting up with this behind-my-back bullshit a second time.”

“I can do that,” she says. It’s an easy enough promise to make. The worst thing she’ll ever have to ask him is already behind them. 

He nods, and that's the end of it. "I should get back," he says. "I'll talk to you later, alright?"

Peko looks over at her, but Natsumi shakes her head, just enough. He slips out the door, letting it lock behind him, and her stomach sinks with relief, not disappointment. She goes back to shopping for her phone; she thinks she’s found the one she wants, slim and pretty, with the model in rose gold.

*

She stops going to class.

There’s no point; from the very start it was always just an appeal to Yukizome’s ego. Nothing about a standard curriculum is going to help her advance the clan, and with bridges officially burned with Sonia, there’s no one left in the 77th with anything worth giving her, anymore. 

If there’s no benefit, there’s no reason to waste time on it. It’s embarrassing that it took her this long to figure that out.

The rest of the school makes it easy. News spreads like wildfire, even through the main course, and within the week people who were avoiding her gaze before are now stepping completely out of her way in the halls, and people who were unafraid to stare now suddenly have more interesting things to occupy themselves with when she walks by.

She puts her energy into new plans and new deals instead. Enoshima puts them in contact with Hisakawa, and the agreement goes off without a hitch; they give her a reduced interest rate in exchange for a locked-in pipeline. Struggling models, struggling designers, bright-eyed hopefuls: Hisakawa puts all of them on Natsumi’s doorstep first. There’s no deception involved; all of them know what they’re getting into, and where they’re accepting money from. Fuyuhiko knows how to make the numbers work, and Natsumi knows how to get the yes.

It’s less showy than what she was trying to do before, but it’s only the beginning. It’s the step she skipped before, laying the foundation to support future endeavors even when the wind starts to blow sideways. It’s what her father does every day; all Natsumi needs is to do it better.

“Holy shit,” Enoshima says, when she drops into an empty seat at Natsumi and Peko’s lunch table. She’s the only one still brazen enough to sit with them uninvited. “You would not _believe_ what a cluster this day has been.” She tilts her chin up. “What’s shakin’, Peko-senpai?”

Peko doesn’t say anything.

Enoshima slurps on her shake. It’s dark purple today; blackberries, Natsumi thinks. Antioxidants and Vitamin C. “Dark and mysterious. Nice.”

Natsumi tolerates her only because her information is good. The underbelly of the fashion world, it turns out, has a lot of slightly-open doors, all of them waiting for Natsumi to stick her foot into. Enoshima points her to the most profitable ones. She’s never asked for anything for herself, but that only means she knows how to play the game, or thinks she does. Let her think she’ll get a favor out of it later on down the line. Natsumi’s happy to cash in until then. 

“Do you have something for me, Enoshima-kun?” she asks.

Enoshima pouts. “You’re awful at foreplay, senpai. You can’t skip right to the main event like that. What about, ‘What’s got you down in the dumps, Enoshima-kun? Exactly what kind of cluster are we talking about, Enoshima-kun? Did you know your skin is _glowing_ today, Enoshima-kun?’”

“Do you or don’t you?”

Her teeth shine when she smiles. “You caught me. My skin looks _amazing,_ right? Not a pore in sight! I’ve been waiting all day for someone to mention it.”

“Then keep waiting,” Natsumi snaps. “Either hand over something worthwhile or get lost.”

Enoshima clucks her tongue. “You’re so serious lately.” She pulls a thin, square envelope from inside her shirt, and slides it to the edge of Natsumi’s tray. “There. You’re _welcome._ ‘Cause I got a feeling you’re really going to like this one.”

Natsumi reaches to take it, but Enoshima pins it to the table with one bright nail before she can. “ _But._ Before we talk business, I wanna get on the gossip train.” Natsumi jerks the envelope out from under her. Enoshima lets her, grinning. “What’s the news? D’you know which way it’s gonna land yet? I _have_ to know.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Natsumi answers, and she doesn’t, so obviously it can’t be important. She splits the top of the envelope with her nail; the note is a letter of introduction for a production facility in Osaka requesting a loan for capital.

Enoshima keeps talking. “Oh, c’mon, you don’t have to be _coy_ about it,” she says. “We’re partners now, right? What happens with you affects me too, you know! I have a right to know if all my good investments are about to go up in a dumpster fire.”

Natsumi is only half-listening, focused more on the gall of someone requesting their own interest rates, but she hears _investments_ and _dumpster fire._ When she looks up, Enoshima is still smiling at her. “Why would you think that?”

“Well,” Enoshima says. “Fuyuhiko-kun’s not really an _A-list_ gangster, if you know what I mean, but he’s still part of the family, you know? I always heard good things about him. If that turns out to be wrong, I wanna know it’s...” she searches for a word, painted nails against her lips, “handled.”

Natsumi grits her teeth. “ _What’s_ handled?”

“Come on! Is Kirigiri giving him the boot or not?” Heads around the dining hall swivel in their direction. Enoshima leans forward, and picks _now_ to lower her voice. “I mean, it takes a special kind of failure to get kicked out of the reserve course, they’re _basically_ just walking bank accounts over there. I didn’t think you were that kind of family.”

They’re not, Natsumi wants to say, but the words aren’t there when she reaches for them. She glares over her shoulder, and the other students who’d been dumb enough to try to eavesdrop abruptly lose interest. Her hands curl into fists on the table, and humiliation burns in her cheeks. 

If it’s not true, who would have enough of a death wish to play a prank like that on her?

If it is true, why does _Enoshima_ know about it before _she_ does?

She doesn’t need to say anything; the grin falls off Enoshima’s face all on its own. She actually looks uncertain, for the first time since Natsumi met her. Her eyes slide to the side, but she’s not just looking away, or avoiding Natsumi’s gaze. She’s looking at Peko. 

“Oh,” she says. “Family secret?”

When Natsumi looks at Peko, Peko is looking at her. There are lines of confusion in her face, or maybe anxiety, and Natsumi realizes that for the first time in her life, she’s not sure which it is. “Did you know about this?” she demands.

“No,” Peko replies, at once. It should make Natsumi feel better, but instead the coil of frustration in her belly curls tighter. “I spoke to Fuyuhiko-sama last night, but he never mentioned—”

“Because if you _knew,_ ” Natsumi says over her, “and you didn’t tell me, we’re going to have a problem. Understand?”

Peko startles, her eyes big behind her glasses. Enoshima is, for once, silent.

“Young mistress,” Peko manages, head low. “My only priorities are your safety, and your needs. I would not hide something of this magnitude from you, even if your brother requested it.”

“Good.” Natsumi focuses again on her food. The sight of it turns her stomach, now. “You’re done, Enoshima-kun.”

“Hey,” Enoshima says. “I meant what I said. If your family can’t keep it together—”

“What are you trying to get at, huh? You’re saying I should do anything before talking to my brother? Because of something you say you heard?” Enoshima only stares at her, her mouth a thin line. “If there’s a problem, it’ll get handled, believe me. You’re _done,_ Enoshima-kun.”

Enoshima stands up, one hand slapped on the table. “Fine, fine. You’re the boss, after all. Let’s just hope you know what you’re doing better than he does, senpai.”

Her shake gurgles as she goes.

*

She’s waiting on the steps of the west building when her brother comes out after school. The reserve course students who’d been loitering there all scattered the moment she sat down, eyes low and heads together. 

The wide main doors of the west building creak when they open; there are a few, long seconds of tense silence before they creak back shut again.

“I thought you’d be training with Peko,” Fuyuhiko says behind her.

“I don’t train _with_ Peko,” she answers. She doesn’t look up at him. “I’m not the one swinging a sword around.”

“You know what I mean.”

“This is more important.” She pats the space beside her on the step. He sits, but only after he spends a drawn-out moment staring at the back of her head. 

“Can we make it quick?” he says, “I’ve got a lot of homework.” He shrugs the strap of his bag off his shoulder before he sits. Probably he wants her to think that him rubbing his neck is from the weight of the bag, but he should know better by now.

“Sure,” she says, conversational, “if you wanna come clean right now instead of pretending like you’ve ever been any good at lying.”

He sucks in a breath. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“See? That’s exactly what I mean!” She copies him, a big gasping breath with both hands clapped over her mouth. He glares at her, shoulders drawn back. “It’s like you don’t even _try._ ”

“What the fuck do you want me to say?”

“The truth, for starters. Since when are we all about keeping secrets?”

There’s no point in asking. He looks away, arms crossed over his knees, and she knows the answer.

She wonders what else there is that she still doesn’t know.

“I’m getting expelled,” he says. His voice, his expression: it’s all flat, like he doesn’t even care. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“You’re not getting expelled,” she tells him, because there’s no reason for him to say it like the decision’s already been made. He only raises his eyebrows at her. “What did you do?”

He stretches his legs out on the steps. “Apparently,” he says, “I attacked another student. Hit her to the ground and then threatened her in front of witnesses. Like a real certified moron.” He picks at a loose piling on his knee. He’s never been this calm about anything in his life, except this, apparently. “Sound familiar?”

“Satou’s saying that?”

“The _school’s_ saying that. You should’ve seen Kirigiri’s face, trying to feed me that fucking fairy tale.” 

“Bullshit they are. I’ll—”

The look he throws her is so serious she almost doesn’t recognize him. “You’re not doing anything,” he says. “Leave it alone.”

She almost chokes on her own indignation. “Are you kidding me?” she demands. “No, I won’t _leave it alone._ They don’t have the right to walk all over us like this. If they want to punish me, they can sack up and face _me._ “

“They’re covering this shit up specifically so that you _don’t_ get punished, dumbass. You really think _I’m_ the one Satou wants gone?” Natsumi opens her mouth, but he doesn’t give her the chance to answer. “No. You shut up and listen. They don’t give a shit about one reserve course kid, all right? They don’t give a shit about a hundred reserve course kids. They want to keep you in the main course, and so do we. So just leave it alone, and you’ve got a clean slate. All you have to do is give this stupid fucking grudge match with Satou a _rest_ already.”

She stares at him. She doesn’t know when he turned into this, someone so ready to roll over and be beaten. Maybe he’s let the reserve course get into his head. Maybe he really just hates it here that much.

Natsumi decides she doesn’t care.

“ _Satou_ got what was coming to her,” she says, before he can interrupt her again. “There was a problem and I handled it. What was I supposed to do, let her go around trashing us to anyone who would listen? People need to know that I’m not going to fucking stand for that.”

“Satou’s not shit, and everybody knows it. Is it worth dealing with all this bullshit now, just to shut her up?”

“Yes,” she snaps, “because nothing’s going to happen! I’m _not_ letting them think they can just lead us around by the nose like a couple of fucking dogs. Do you have any idea how that would make us look? How it would make _me_ look?”

“How in the hell is this suddenly all about you? _Again?_ ” She can’t help it; she rolls her eyes, and that only makes it worse. He blows up in her face, enough that the birds resting on the steps below them scatter into the bushes. “Dammit, this is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you! For once in your whole fucking life, will you just listen to what I want? For _once._ ”

“The clan comes first,” she snaps back. “It sure as hell comes before your stupid _feelings._ How is it that I’m the one who has to explain that to you? This isn’t about you _or_ me, it’s about our reputation! What are people, _our_ people, going to think if it gets out that I can’t even handle a bunch of school teachers? That I’m willing to just let my little brother take the fall because I’m too afraid of what they might do to me?” 

She finds ice in her chest and holds onto it, lets it seep through her until she can be the same cold steel as her father. “This school doesn’t control me,” she says. “Nobody controls me. Understand?”

Fuyuhiko doesn’t have an answer. He stares at her, jaw clenched.

“Yeah,” he says finally. “We both know I sure as hell don’t.” He pushes himself up to standing. He won’t look at her. “I’m asking you to leave it alone, Natsumi,” he says, shrugging his bag higher on his shoulder. “So do whatever you want. You always do anyway.”

She hugs her knees against her chest and watches him go with her jaw clamped shut. If she doesn’t do that, she’ll shout something after him, and she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction. He’s her brother. He’s _family._ That’s supposed to count for something to them.

In her head, she can see the panicked slide of Enoshima’s gaze, from Natsumi’s face to Peko’s: looking for help, or guidance, or some kind of cue. She’s not stupid. She’s seen it before. 

She can’t clamp her jaw down on that. “Did you tell Peko?” she blurts.

He stops, one foot on the lowest step, and twists back toward her. “What?”

“Did you tell Peko?” she says again.

“I heard what you said, dumbass. Why the fuck would I tell Peko if I already decided I wasn’t going to tell you?”

She doesn’t know. It doesn’t stop her from needing the answer. “Did you or didn’t you?”

“ _No._ ” He bites the end of the syllable off. “The only one I told is Hinata, and that was only because he was there when Kirigiri called me back. Alright? Fuck.”

She hugs her knees closer to her chest. “Whatever you think,” she tells him, “I’m the one who has to make the decisions. I’m the one everybody’s gonna be looking at when something goes wrong. _Me._ So I’m doing what I have to do, for us. That’s all I’ve ever been doing.”

He doesn’t answer. He turns his back again, and leaves her there alone on the steps.

*

Peko’s still in the dojo when Natsumi gets back. She’s not going through her forms, she’s practicing on the training dummies, and it isn’t with her shinai, it’s with her katana. When Natsumi slides the door open, she’s split one of the dummies open from hip to shoulder, shards of wood shattering and scattering out onto the floor.

She holds the cut, the far tip of her blade perfectly aligned with her shoulder. There’s a small semicircle of other students watching her; they take one look at Natsumi and slink away with their heads down, either into the locker rooms or out into the hall.

Peko turns toward her, both hands clasped over the hilt of her weapon. She bows deeply at the waist. “Young mistress.”

“I talked to my brother,” Natsumi says. Peko doesn’t straighten. “I believe you when you say he didn’t tell you anything.”

Peko breathes, a long, slow exhale, but all she says is, “Thank you, young mistress.”

“I should’ve trusted you more.” Peko doesn’t react. It’s at the point where it’s annoying, not respectful. “Will you stand up already? I’m trying to apologize.”

“That’s not necessary.” She obeys, though, drawing herself back up to full height. “Fuyuhiko-sama and I are close. It’s not unreasonable to think he might have confided in me. You were well within your rights to confirm what I told you.”

“I know that.” Peko lowers her eyes, deferential. “This isn’t about him. If there’s anybody I can trust in this place, it’s you. Just you. It was dumb of me to forget that.”

Natsumi can read the uncertainty in the way Peko’s fingers curl in at her sides. She wants to look up, but isn’t letting herself. “You can trust me,” she says to the floor. “But I’m sure that Fuyuhiko-sama would always—”

“I said,” Natsumi interrupts, and Peko cuts herself obediently off, “this isn’t about him. The only thing that matters is you and me. I need to be sure you’re on my side. Got it? I need to know you’ll be there, no matter what happens.”

For the first time since Natsumi walked in, Peko looks up of her own volition. Her eyes are bright and her gaze is firm. “Always.”

“Good,” Natsumi says. “Are you done with your training?”

“I am if you need me to be. Have you made a decision on how to address the issue with Fuyuhiko-sama?”

“Yeah. But we don’t have to go anywhere right now.” She picks a spot on one of the empty benches and sits cross-legged. “I’m not in a rush, and it’s important you finish, so.” She waves one hand. Peko nods, and drops into her cooldown forms.

She doesn’t have a partner, but that’s never stopped her before. Her eyes narrow against an imaginary opponent, and she moves through each form with liquid ease. The slim line of her katana makes the whole thing look a hundred times more graceful than her clunky shinai ever did.

Natsumi counts them in her head, the way she has since they were children.

Ippon-me.

Nihon-me.

Sanbon-me.

*

The school’s computer network goes down in the early hours of the morning. It comes back up within twenty minutes, but the database of student records gets corrupted in the process. There are backups to restore from, but restoring that much data for that many people takes time.

(That’s how the senior class’s Ultimate Hacker explains it to her, anyway, face illuminated by the blue glow of her computer screen as lines and lines of data scroll past. Natsumi doesn’t care either way. She doesn’t need to understand it, she just needs it to happen.)

Principal Kirigiri apologizes to the student body in a morning announcement. “Continue on as normal,” he says. “We hope to have everything back in order in the next few days.”

A few days is plenty of time.

*

Hinata is harder to track down than she expects. She realizes that the only pieces of his schedule she knows are the ones where it intersects with her brother’s, which won’t work for her, this time. He doesn’t seem to be in any clubs, play any sports, or have many other friends; it’s something she should have expected from a friend of her brother’s, maybe, but that doesn’t make it any less of a pain.

She manages it, though. Obviously. It only takes her a day to figure out that the place he always vanishes off to after school is a fountain in one of the courtyards between the east building and the west building. She catches him on his way there, walking fast through the courtyard. He sees her, and then he immediately ducks his head to pretend he didn’t.

“Hey!” she shouts, and he stops in his tracks, shoulders drawn up to his ears. “Hinata-kun!”

She has to hand it to him: he’s not stupid enough to try and bolt into the bushes. He resigns himself to being caught and turns towards her, smile strained. “Uh.” He fidgets with the knot of his tie until it’s loose against his collar. “Hi, Kuzuryuu-san. Your brother’s not here.”

“Do I look stupid to you?” He purses his lips, but shakes his head. “No. I know he’s not here, I was looking for _you._ ”

“Me?” His eyes dart from side-to-side, wary. “Uh, I don’t….”

“We got off on the wrong foot before,” she says, before he can finish the thought. “You know? So I think we should start over. A friend of my brother’s is a friend of mine, right?”

He rolls his shoulders back, his expression turning stony. There it is again, Hinata’s slim spine. “You seemed pretty convinced I _wasn’t_ his friend, before,” he says, tone flat.

“That was then,” she says. “This is now. That’s what _starting over_ means, isn’t it?”

“Okay,” he says, but there’s still a sardonic bent to it she doesn’t appreciate. She bites her tongue. She needs this to work on the first try. “Why bother now, then?”

“My brother is— stressed out,” she says. “Recent... _events_ haven’t made things any better. I need your help to help him.” She raises her eyebrows at him. “I mean, if he’s your friend. That’s what friends do, right?”

Hinata manages to keep his face carefully neutral, and he only fidgets a little bit. If she _were_ stupid, it might actually fool her. “Sorry, Kuzuryuu-san,” he says. “I don’t know what you mean. He’s seemed fine to me.”

“You can give up the act,” she tells him. “I already know.” 

To his credit, Hinata doesn’t break easily. He looks away, a sort of longing half-glance towards the fountain she’s holding him up from, but he keeps his mouth shut. The most he gives her is an anemic little shrug, and nothing else.

“I know they’re trying to expel him,” she says. She doesn’t have the patience to try and unravel him the old-fashioned way. “Okay? Happy now?”

The put-on neutrality on his face gives way. “Sorry,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck, and she thinks he might actually be. “He didn’t want you to know, and he said that you might—” His brain must catch up with his mouth, because he cuts himself off. “I was just being careful.”

“Maybe next time lie like you actually mean it,” she tells him. “If I _didn’t_ know it would’ve taken me all of, oh, two seconds to figure out something was up.”

“Thanks,” he says, and this time when he looks away it’s to hide the shallow roll of his eyes. She pretends not to notice, for his sake. “Do you actually have a plan or what?”

“Of course I have a plan. Who do you think I am?” She pulls tickets from her blouse pocket, and holds them out to him between two fingers. “Here.”

He looks at her hand like she’s offering him the detonator of a bomb. “What are they?”

“Movie tickets, stupid. My brother’s been waiting _months_ for this dumb explode-y action flick to come out. It’s all he talked about, all freaking summer. So I got premiere tickets.” She waves them under his nose. “Will you just take them?”

He has to stretch his arm all the way out, because apparently he doesn’t want to take a single step closer to her. She makes sure to grin in his face when he makes brief eye contact, right before he plucks the tickets out of her hands.

“My brother _loves_ to wallow,” she says. “If there was a talent for drowning yourself in self-pity, he’d be the top candidate. What he needs is a distraction, so.“ She flicks the tickets with her middle finger, just to see Hinata flinch. It’s worth it. “They’re for Thursday night. You can just go out into the city after school. Tell him you won them in a contest or something, I don’t care.”

Hinata is frowning. He squints up at her. “There’s only two.”

“Yeah, and?”

“You’re not going to come?”

It interrupts her rhythm. She hadn’t expected him to notice or care about that part. “That garbage puts me to sleep,” she says. Hinata doesn’t say anything, so she keeps on talking. “Besides, the whole point is for him to actually relax for once, right? That’s not gonna happen if I’m there. So.”

He hovers, one hand twisting the strap of his bag. The paper tickets make a faint scratching sound when he rubs them thoughtfully together. It grates on her nerves.

“What now?” she demands.

“Nothing. I just—” He chews his bottom lip. When he looks up at her, his eyes are intense. “You know your brother cares about you, right, Kuzuryuu-san?”

The hiccup in her rhythm turns into a pothole. She fumbles her words. “What kind of stupid question is that?” Hinata shrugs, but doesn’t take the question back. Natsumi folds her arms tight over her middle. “Of course I know that. Why do you think I’m doing this?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “You’re right. Sorry.”

She doesn’t think he’s sorry at all, this time.

“So you’ll do it?” she presses anyway. “Thursday, after school.”

“Yeah.” He’s smiling at her when he tucks the tickets into his bag, even if it’s small. “I think you’re right, he could use the distraction. Thanks, Kuzuryuu-san.”

“Great!” He jumps when she claps him on the shoulder. “You’re not so useless after all, Hinata-kun. We might even be a good team.” She turns away from him, and calls back over her shoulder: “Have fun with Nanami-san! I think she likes you.”

She leaves him there, standing dumbfounded in the courtyard with his mouth hanging open. She’s not worried. Hinata’s not bright, but he hasn’t done wrong by her brother so far. 

It’ll work.

*

The day of the main event, she goes to afternoon homeroom for the first time in weeks. Not for any particular reason; she’s spent the last three days doing nothing but preparing, and by the end of the school day there’s nothing left to do but wait. She doesn’t feel like spending it in silence in the dojo, not with the way her pulse has been racing since lunch, and by the start of the period she finds herself in the doorway, one hand on the frame.

Yukizome is beside herself. It’s almost embarrassing. “Kuzuryuu-san! Pekoyama-san!” Natsumi jerks her hands back before she can clasp them, but Yukizome only clasps her own together instead. “Welcome back. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

The rest of the class is less enthused. A year ago, the room would have been buzzing with quiet conversation. Today, it’s dead silent.

“Look who finally decided to show her face,” Saionji jeers, when Natsumi puts her bag down. “Not so afraid of us anymore? I’m impressed, since your muscle’s basically brain-dead. That’s gotta take a lot of courage.”

Natsumi stands over her desk. Peko stands behind her. “You tell me, Saionji-san. You’ve got the whole story, right? You know how easy it is for me to _crush_ a _bug._ ”

“Girls,” Yukizome interrupts. Her voice is strained. “Please.”

“Hiyoko-chan,” Koizumi whispers. “Don’t. She’s not worth the energy.”

Saionji stares at her a few seconds more, and then she tosses her head. “Whatever. Like I care how this bitch spends her time. Let’s just get this over with.”

Yukizome tries. Nobody could deny that. She gives her lecture the way she always does, with enthusiasm and drawn diagrams on the blackboard. She tries to get them to contribute, the way she always does, with leading questions and discussion prompts, but no one picks up the cues she lays down.

Natsumi isn’t listening anyway. She’s distracted by the way her own knee is bouncing beneath her desk, and how it won’t stop even when she tries to force it. She doesn’t even notice when her phone lights up with a new message, not right away.

**fuyu-chan**  
14:42  
just reminding you: you’re not gonna be able to bribe your way out of this

**fuyu-chan**  
14:42  
it’s a start though

She breathes out. Everything’s in place. The rest of the class feels at once like an eternity and an eyeblink, but the bell rings eventually, and that’s when her timer really starts. 

No turning back now.

While she’s still gathering her things together, Yukizome sets a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Before you go, Kuzuryuu-san,” she says, smiling, “would you mind helping me clean up today? I could use the extra hands. And I thought maybe we could catch up.“

Natsumi shrugs her off. “Sorry,” she says, already halfway out the door. “Got plans already.”

Yukizome doesn’t try to stop her.

*

Satou dropped photography club after middle school. Natsumi wasn’t speaking to her then, so she never heard exactly why, but she doesn’t think it takes a genius to figure out. No one could ever live up to Koizumi’s impossible standards; not even Satou, who always spent all her time talking them up.

The point is: when she dropped photography, she picked up archery. She’s mediocre, Natsumi’s heard, which doesn’t surprise her in the least. Satou was never an athlete. She was never much of anything. Natsumi doesn’t know why she bothers.

It’s just as well, though. She has Satou’s mediocrity to thank now, for the late hour and the empty hallway and the darkness in this classroom. She waits with Peko in silence until she loses track of minutes and starts measuring out time based on the pounding of her own pulse in her ears instead.

Satou drops her bag when Natsumi opens the door into the hall. Brightly colored arrows rattle against the floor when they spill out from one of the outside pockets, cheerful blues and reds and yellows rolling in all directions. 

She stoops to pick them up, but freezes when Natsumi whistles, long and loud. “Wow, Satou-san! You’re here late. Did you have a good workout?”

Satou stands slowly, the few arrows she’d managed to grab clutched close against her chest. She looks back over her shoulder, like it will make a difference; the end of the hallway is swallowed by shadows, untouched by the few after-hours fluorescent bulbs over their heads.

“Don’t worry,” Natsumi says to the back of her head. “It’s just you and me. And Peko-chan, obviously.”

“You can’t intimidate me, Natsumi,” Satou says, twisting back around. She lifts her chin, but it trembles. “I won’t let you.”

“Intimidate?” Natsumi echoes. “Who, me? Come on, now, Satou-san. You’ve got it all wrong. That’s not what I’m here for at all.”

“Kuzuryuu-kun is going to get expelled,” Satou tells her. “You can try to delay it all you want, but it’s going to happen.” She gains confidence the longer she talks, and that was always the problem with her, even back in middle school. She could always convince herself of anything, even when the opposite was staring her right in the face. “I didn’t want it to. He didn’t do anything. But you only have yourself to blame for it.”

“Oh, really?” Natsumi considers the ceiling. “Because I bet I could think of a few other people worth blaming.”

She smiles, but the effect is lost, a little bit. Satou’s eyes keep jumping behind her left shoulder instead of staying on her face.

“Hey,” she snaps. “Don’t look at her. Look at me.”

Satou obeys, with effort. Her knuckles are white where they’re wrapped around the small bundle of arrows.

“Like I was saying.” Natsumi lets her expression melt back into the smile. “I’m not here to intimidate anybody. I mean, that sort of thing takes _forever,_ you know? And I’ve already spent way more time in this dump than I ever wanted to. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t be here at all. I’m missing out on a movie night with my brother to be here with you right now, did you know that?”

Satou doesn’t have much of a poker face. The lines around her eyes pinch, confusion and anxiety mixed together.

“But! Business is business,” Natsumi goes on. “And I have responsibilities, you know. It’s a bummer sometimes, but what can you do?” She tilts her head, and Peko steps out around her. Today she only has her katana. “You started this. It’s just professional courtesy for me to finish it.”

And finally, for what feels like the first time ever, _finally_ Satou understands. 

“Wait,” she says, and chokes on the syllable. The arrows in her hands clatter to the floor. “You’re not…. You can’t—”

“I can’t what?” Natsumi interrupts. “Defend myself against a shameless attack on my family and my clan? Did you really think I was just going to let this slide? Let you and Kirigiri try to strongarm me into playing by your rules?” Satou is white. Natsumi claps one hand against her own cheek. “Wow, you _really_ don’t know me at all, do you?”

“I— I’ll take back the complaint,” Satou tries. It could almost be funny, how quick that tune changed. “I’ll make sure Principal Kirigiri lets Kuzuryuu-kun stay, just—”

“You still think this is about _him?_ ” Natsumi laughs, because she has to. Satou stumbles backwards, and the heel of her shoe sends one of her dropped arrows skidding across the floor. “This isn’t even about _you._ Are you really just that dumb, Satou-san? I even explained it to you.”

“Then what… what can I….”

Natsumi lets her smile drop. She crosses both arms under her chest. “Nothing,” she says. “What’s done is done. I gave you plenty of warnings. What did I say before?” She waits. Satou seems to have run out of words. “I _said,_ we’re not going to have this conversation again. Peko-chan?”

The draw of Peko’s sword is visceral. Natsumi feels it like another limb, like it’s her blade, her will. 

“No,” Satou whispers, a sharp intake of breath. “No, no. Wait, please—” 

Natsumi throws out a few fingers. That’s all it takes.

Satou tries to scream, but either her breath is gone or Natsumi’s head is too full to hear it. It doesn’t matter. Peko is faster than her. Peko is faster than all of them. Natsumi only sees a blurred arc of silver in the corner of her eye, and she can’t tell where in it Peko’s braids stop and the curve of her blade begins.

There is a wet, thick sound, and then it’s over.

The spill of Satou’s blood squelches when her body hits the floor. It drips from the end of Peko’s sword, and she flicks off the excess in a messy line at her feet. Natsumi can taste metal in the back of her throat.

When they were twelve, she and Satou and Koizumi had all gone shopping together. Natsumi had bought a pink dress. It’s still in her closet, all the way at the back.

“Young mistress,” Peko says. “I am finished.”

Natsumi forces herself to look down. It’s not the first dead body she’s ever seen, and it’s not even the first time she’s watched Peko kill on her behalf, but it is the first time it’s been on her order. It won’t be the last. She refuses to cower in the face of it.

Satou’s dropped arrows cut abrupt, colorful lines through the dark pool around her. It makes the whole scene look ridiculous, like Satou had slipped and fallen in a child’s finger painting. Her hair is spread out around her in a wide ring, rapidly soaking through with blood. Her arm is bent at an awkward angle; Natsumi thinks that it must be painful, before she remembers.

Satou’s eyes are open. They stare up at her, wide and glassy. Those last moments of fear didn’t get erased by death; they were warped and mangled and frozen there, and Natsumi thinks she won’t be able to imagine any other expression on Satou’s face for the rest of her life.

Natsumi’s stomach heaves. Acid burns the back of her throat, but she doesn’t let it up; she looks at the coagulated clumps of blood in Satou’s hair, and swallows it back down.

Her voice is unsteady when she says, “Peko.” 

If Peko notices or cares, she doesn’t make any indication. Her expression is blank when she looks over, but her eyes are clear. The front of her uniform is splattered with blood. There’s a sharp line of it across her cheek.

“Clean this up,” Natsumi says. “I’ve got somewhere I need to be.”

“Yes.”

She leaves through the west building’s front doors. The evening air from the courtyard outside is fresh and cool and clean when it hits her face.

*

There’s more than half the school year left before the practical exams. The identities of the judges are never released this early, but Natsumi knows they’ve already been chosen. Getting their names isn’t hard. The whole school is cowering at her feet now, and that includes the desk jockeys that send out the Academy memos.

The head judge this year is a board member named Amachi Satomi. She was a homeroom teacher for the senior class for forty years before she retired, and is a graduate of the Academy herself. Her talent at the time had been Ultimate Negotiator.

Natsumi leaves a newspaper from the day after on Amachi’s desk, the top headline reading _STUDENT MURDERED AT HOPE’S PEAK ACADEMY._ There’s an aerial shot of the east building underneath it, the same image that’s used in all of the school’s promotional materials. Natsumi drives her knife through the image of the school’s tall front gates, until the polished wood of Amachi’s desk cracks and splinters.

She writes a second headline beneath the first in permanent marker, to be sure that she and Amachi have an understanding. There’s been an issue with people not getting her the first time, lately.

**THE KUZURYUU CLAN ABIDES NO INSULT**


	7. Chapter 7

She ends up right where she means to be: in the plush chair opposite Kirigiri’s desk. She lounges in it, arms wide and shoulders back, with her legs crossed at the knee. It’s comfortable. It makes sense that Kirigiri wouldn’t know much about power plays.

Peko stands behind her, a silent sentry by the door. Natsumi had her pack her shinai away for good after she’d left her message for Amachi; her katana is more emblematic of the message Natsumi wants to send to everyone from here on out.

“The intent was to speak to you only, Kuzuryuu-kun,” Kirigiri says. He lifts one hand towards the door. “Pekoyama-kun, if you’d like to wait—”

“Peko-chan goes where I go,” Natsumi says. “Take it or leave it.”

Kirigiri’s mouth presses into a thin line. He knows something about power plays, Natsumi amends in her head: he knows when he’s on the receiving end of one. “Pekoyama-kun,” he says, eyes sliding to the back of the room. “This is alright with you?”

Peko says nothing.

“She’s fine with it,” Natsumi answers.

“I see.” He clears his throat. He’s uncomfortable. _Good._ “The school is taking these inquiries very seriously, Kuzuryuu-kun. I appreciate your full cooperation with this investigation.”

“You’re welcome,” she says. “Wouldn’t want people getting the wrong impression of the school, right? Gotta keep that enrollment up, up, up. Especially if those grants are about to go up in smoke.” 

“The school needs to be safe,” Kirigiri says. “For everyone.”

“Sure. That too.”

He peels the top few papers back from the stack on his desk. “Of course, we’ll be speaking to….” He squints at the page. He’s not a good actor, Natsumi decides. “Kuzuryuu Fuyuhiko, as well. Satou Yume had brought to our attention some behavioral concerns that warranted—”

Natsumi picks at a loose rivet on the chair’s left armrest. “My brother was in the city that night,” she says. “You can ask the theater if you want. Gotta be at least twenty independent witnesses who can corroborate it.” The rivet twists off in her fingers. “Well. Nineteen, if you don’t count Hinata-kun. High school students can give some pretty unreliable testimony sometimes, did you know that?”

“I don’t think it’s the students that are unreliable,” he says. He clears his throat again. He probably shouldn’t have said it. “Regardless, we’ll speak to the theater. You understand the need to be thorough.”

“Sure,” she says. “It’s your time to waste, I guess.”

The pristine, square line of Kirigiri’s shoulders slumps when he sighs. “To be candid,” he says, “you’re making it very difficult to help you, Kuzuryuu-kun.”

She looks him straight in the eye. “It’s a good thing I’m not looking for your help, then, huh?” 

Silence settles. It’s up to him to give up this student-teacher charade if he wants there to be any progress. She’s been generous with opportunities this morning; she doesn’t intend to extend any more. Both parties have to reach across the table in order to make a deal. If he has to reach further than her, well, that’s his own fault, isn’t it?

He makes the right choice. She’s never thought Kirigiri was stupid, only weak. “Then what is it you _are_ looking for?”

“A mutual understanding,” she says, “that’s all. Between you, me, and the guys upstairs. Y’see, I get the feeling we’ve been stepping on each other’s toes this whole time. Butting heads when we don’t need to. I wanna clear the air.” She leans forward to put the loose rivet on the edge of his desk. “So that unfortunate things like what happened to Satou-san don’t happen again.”

He’s very calm when he says, “Is that a threat?”

She smiles. “Only as much as that dig at my brother was a threat. How about it?”

Kirigiri’s gaze breaks down to the stack of papers on his deck, to the profile of her brother set out on the top. That’s his problem. He bothers to feel guilty.

Natsumi slaps both hands down on the arms of the chair. “Here’s the deal,” she says. When she stands, Kirigiri only looks up at her. There are too many lines in his face for a man his age. “What you’ve seen from me is just the beginning. You and your _judges_ wanted to see my talent? You’re seeing it, and so is everyone else. So there are two ways this can go.” She counts them on her fingers for him, her other hand on her hip. “One, we put all this behind us. Your school gets to keep me, my brother, _and_ my parents’ fat stacks of cash, and everybody here gets to see the more… _generous_ side of me and my family’s business. Win-win-win, all around. That’s _my_ preferred option.”

“And two?” he prompts.

“Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it?” She draws it out, waits for him to shake his head. “Two, my brother and I pack up our talent and go. And, well.” She leans over the edge of his desk. “You get what’s coming to you.”

That one really is a threat. She has to hand it to him: he doesn’t look away this time. 

“And that’s it!” She stretches her arms high over her head, until her spine pops. “Run that up to your bosses and let me know.”

“Kuzuryuu-kun,” he says, sharp. “I assure you that any decisions will be made by me.”

She has to laugh. “When’s the last time _you_ made a decision? You know, a real one.” She doesn’t let him answer. “I’ll be around. Let me know if you have any questions!”

Peko holds the door open for her. 

*

There’s a throng of students huddled in the hall outside Kirigiri’s office. They’re whispering when the door opens, but suddenly they’ve got nothing to say when Peko shuts it behind them. Koizumi is hovering at the center of their little pow-wow, near the back, hands white-knuckled around her own elbows. One of the other girls puts a loose arm around her shoulders and whispers something to her, but she doesn’t react, only stares.

“Take a picture,” Natsumi snaps at them. A boy near the front winces. “I hear Koizumi-san’s supposed to be good at that.”

The girl’s arm tightens around Koizumi’s shoulders, but Koizumi ducks out from under her and pushes her way to the front. Her hair is limp around her face, and the circles under her eyes are more like gouges. She bypasses Natsumi entirely. “What,” she says to the security guards posted on either side of Kirigiri’s door, “that’s it? You’re going to let her go? Just like that?”

The guards avert their eyes.

Koizumi looks frozen. She shakes her head, an unnatural, jerky motion. “No,” she says. When she reaches out to clasp the sleeve of one of the guards, he shakes her off. “No, you can’t do this. You have to know what she did. Everyone knows what she did!”

Natsumi sets one hand on her shoulder. Koizumi flinches with her entire body, heels of her shoes squeaking against the floor, and Natsumi digs her nails into the top seam of her blouse. 

“Come on, Koizumi-san,” she says. “I know you’re upset. I’m upset, too. But it’s time to let this middle school grudge go.” Koizumi stares at her, eyes wide and wild. “That’s what Yume-chan would’ve wanted, don’t you think? After all this?” 

Koizumi gulps air like a fish gulps water, mouth open wide. Natsumi pats her shoulder once, and smiles when she turns away.

“No.” Koizumi’s nails catch the edge of Natsumi’s wrist and pinch in, dig deep. “No! I’m not letting this happen again. I know it was you, Natsumi! I’m not going to just let you walk away!”

Natsumi tries to wrench her arm back, but Koizumi only tightens her grip. Her nails drag against skin, and leave angry red welts in their wake. “Hey!” Natsumi shouts. “Get off me, bitch!”

The hall is already almost too narrow to accommodate all the people in it; when panic sweeps through, it takes no time at all for it to turn to chaos. Kirigiri’s guards sweep forward to keep the crowd from trampling itself, one barking for backup into a walkie-talkie. 

“Stop!” one girl screams. “Stop it!”

“No!” Koizumi screams back. “No! Someone has to do something about this! I’m done sitting by while you—”

An arm cuts between them, and Koizumi shrieks, “ _No!_ ” when she’s lifted bodily off the ground. Her nails scrabble at the edge of Natsumi’s sleeve, but the fabric gives first; it rips along one seam when Natsumi jerks her arm away, a brutal, echoing sound in the narrow hallway.

Peko has Koizumi by the shoulders. She slams her back against the wall, her forearm an iron bar across her throat. 

The other students keep screaming. Some of them take off down the hallway; others surge forward against the guards trying to hold them back. Kirigiri stands in the open doorway of his office, and does nothing.

Natsumi finds her feet. Her right arm is bleeding, and the sleeve of her blouse is hanging off of one shoulder. She lets herself enjoy a few good, long seconds of watching Koizumi wheeze and flail in Peko’s grip, and then she says, “That’s _enough._ ”

Peko drops her. Koizumi hits the ground on her hands and knees; it sounds painful, hard bone against linoleum. She curls into the floor, arms hugged around her middle, and her gasping breaths turn into shuddering sobs.

It’s pathetic.

Natsumi shoves the mess of her hair back from her neck, and steps over Koizumi’s shaking form to get to the other side of the hallway. What’s left of the crowd of onlookers parts for her to pass. 

She sends Peko to get her a new shirt from her dorm room.

*

There are eight unread messages on her phone. She hasn’t looked at seven of them; the notifications are all collapsed under the first, sent a week and a half ago:

**fuyu-chan**  
09:01  
we need to talk

The school is on what the security team calls a “temporary restricted schedule.” Classes and clubs are still meeting as normal, but curfew has been bumped up, and the school is crawling with extra guards, even during the day. Main course students have to inform their teachers when they plan to practice on their own. Reserve course students aren’t permitted to leave the west campus at all, for any reason.

Natsumi doesn’t bother telling anyone when she and Peko slip out during afternoon homeroom. No one stops them to even give them the opportunity to lie; the guards at the main doors only watch when they trot down the front steps and cut across the courtyard.

Enoshima is waiting for her on the northern side of the building. It’s dark, the whole north wall swallowed by late afternoon shadows. The sharp angles of her face look soft in the low light, even when her shark’s grin splits her face. 

“Heyyyyy!” She cups both hands around her mouth, a stage whisper. “Look who it is! The mover and milkshaker of the reserve course. You’ve really got all of ‘em wrapped around your little finger, huh?“

Peko hangs back to keep watch. Natsumi leans against against the wall, and holds out an expectant hand. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Some kid tried to muscle his way into the east building the other day.” Enoshima pulls an envelope from inside her shirt and wiggles it out for Natsumi to take. “You should’ve heard him.” She claps her free hand over her heart. “‘Kuzuryuu-san, Kuzuryuu-san! Let me through!’ It’d almost be sad if it wasn’t so embarrassing. His poor talentless heart, squished like a bug.” She squeezes her thumb and forefinger together, “ _Prrfft._ ”

Natsumi lifts the flap of the envelope with one nail. The bills are sorted and stacked the way she asked; just eyeballing it, the numbers look correct. She dumps the stack out into her hand anyway.

“You’ve got a down payment right there,” Enoshima tells her. “Plus first month’s collection. They want you to know they’re coming in good faith.” She bumps Natsumi’s shoulder with hers. “Everything look good?”

Natsumi flips through the bills. Some of them are old and stained. “Not until I count it,” she answers.

“Sure, sure.” Enoshima’s smile is wide. “I’ve got all afternoon.” 

Natsumi counts. Normally this is the sort of thing she’d pass off on her brother, making sure all the numbers are right, but inviting _that_ conversation is way more trouble than it’s worth right now. She’s been focusing on improving on the business side of things, anyway. First she needs to be just as conversant as Fuyuhiko, and then she needs to be better.

“What happened to him?” she asks, after she rounds the first 250k.

“Who?”

“Hinata-kun.” Enoshima stares at her. “The reserve course kid.”

“Oh! I dunno. Security sent him packing, I guess.” She laces her fingers under her chin. “Why? You got a thing for the bottom of the barrel?” 

Natsumi rolls her eyes. “No. But if he’s making an ass out of himself you can bet my stupid brother is gonna blame that on me, too.”

Peko’s phone pings, too loud. The new ringtone is airy and annoying, like a bell; Natsumi had told her to pick one of the presets, so that Natsumi would know whenever new messages came in, and somehow she’d managed to land on the worst one.

She dips into a shallow bow. “Apologies.”

Natsumi doesn’t look up. She shuffles the stack of bills back against her palm; all 500k is there and accounted for. “Who’s that?” 

Peko shifts to pull her phone from her pocket. “Fuyuhiko-sama,” she answers, like she even needed to check. Like Natsumi even needed to ask.

“What’s he want?”

“He says he sent you another message this morning.” He did. Natsumi hasn’t read it, either. “He wants me to encourage you to reply.”

Natsumi feels her lip curl. “Yeah,” she snorts, “I bet he said it like that.” 

“Would you like me to read it?”

“No. I already know what it says.” Enoshima holds one hand out, palm up like a toddler waiting for dessert. Natsumi counts her cut out into it, a flat three percent. “Just ignore it.”

“Yes, young mistress.”

Enoshima licks her thumb and peels back the bills in her hand, one by one. “You know,” she says. “I have a sister.”

Natsumi has to wait while she counts, in case Enoshima has an objection about her share. She won’t, if she’s not stupid, but they have to go through the motions anyway. “You better not lose count,” she warns. “I’m not sitting through this a second time.”

Enoshima flaps her hand. “You worry too much, senpai. I’m _great_ at multitasking, you know.” Her fingers don’t hesitate on the bills, at least. She snaps through each one with quick confidence. “Anyway, you wouldn’t believe me if I pointed her out to you. She’s this sad, smelly, homely waste of space.” She curls the end of one pigtail around her finger. “We could _not_ be less alike.”

“So?” Natsumi snaps. “There’s no family and friends discount in our agreement.”

Enoshima sniffs. “Believe me, you don’t have to worry about _that._ I’m not about to let her ruin the good thing we’ve got goin’ on.” She lays back the last bill, and runs her thumb over the whole stack. “It feels pretty good, actually. She’s been dragging me down so long I almost forgot what it was like to just let me be me, you know?”

Natsumi preoccupies herself with tucking the envelope with the rest of the cash down in her bag.

“But she’s my sister,” Enoshima sighs. “Family first. Whaddaya gonna do!” She tucks the roll of bills back into her shirt. “Looks good, senpai! I’ll hit you up as soon as I’ve got something else for you.”

There is a delicate cough behind them.

“Kuzuryuu-san. Pekoyama-san.” Yukizome is looking at them, one hand laid against the corner of the building. Light cuts across the top half of her chest, and leaves the rest of her in shadow; it makes her hair look more fire than ginger. “Did you know class has started?”

*

Natsumi goes. There’s no reason not to; she’s finished her work early, today, and if she wants Kirigiri to take her up on her offer, she needs to show some good faith herself. 

The halls are sparse and silent. She half expects Yukizome to take advantage of the timing and a captive audience to try and teach her a lesson about youth, or draw her feelings out of her like a sloppy emotional corkscrew, or scold her for skipping without telling anyone, or _something,_ but she doesn’t. She leads in silence, hands folded tight in front of her.

More than half the desks are empty, when they get to the classroom. Nanami, Souda, Sonia, and Mitarai have their little back row filled, but the rest of the classroom sprawls in front of them, neat and sad.

Yukizome drags both hands back across her scalp, until her ponytail is lumpy and lopsided. “Where are Owari-san and Nidai-kun?” she says. “They were just here!”

“Owari-san got impatient and left,” Nanami supplies. Her GameGirl is, for once, off and laid on her desk. She drums on the buttons anyway, even with the screen blank. “... Nidai-kun said he was going to bring her back. That was fifteen minutes ago.”

Yukizome breathes in deep, and holds it. She’s frazzled, paler, with flyaways in her hair and bags under her eyes. 

“Well! There’s only about—” She looks up at the wall clock, and lets the rest of her breath out in a rush. “Less than half the class left. We’ll just have to hope they come back soon. Kuzuryuu-san, Pekoyama-san, go ahead and sit down, please.”

Natsumi does as she’s told. In the back of the room, Souda’s head snaps up.

“W-Wait,” he says. He scoops the mess on his desk towards his chest, graph paper and screws and a bunch of half-used mechanical pencils. “No. No, no, no. I’m not staying in here with that psychopath, not for one flippin’ second.”

“Souda-kun,” Nanami tries, quiet and gentle. “It’s okay. I think if Kuzuryuu-san—”

“Are you kidding me? You saw what Pekoyama did to Koizumi, and that was just today! Who _knows_ what they did to that reserve course chick!” He fumbles his books, and the _thwack_ of their hardback covers on the floor rattles in the windows. He leaves them there, scrambling around desks to the door. “Forget this. You couldn’t pay me to breathe the same air as her.”

Natsumi smiles at the ceiling, arms behind her head.

“Souda-kun, wait, please.” Yukizome says. “I understand how you feel, but if we just—”

“No! N-No fucking way. Sorry, teach, but I’m outta here.”

Yukizome follows him out into the hallway. 

She comes back a minute later. 

She can bluster all she wants, but in the end she can’t force any of them to stay. She only ever had any power because they let her have it. 

“I’m sorry, class,” she says, stepping back behind her desk. She’s still smiling, but it’s lopsided and unconvincing, like someone snapped it in half and she pieced it back together incorrectly. “I know these past few weeks have been hard. For everyone.”

“He’s not wrong, you know,” Natsumi says.

Yukizome looks at her like she’s only just seen her.

“Souda-kun,” Natsumi clarifies. “He’s not wrong. I mean, you’ve all heard Koizumi-san’s sob story by now, I bet. And who _does_ know what else I’ve been up to? Maybe I’m an impediment to your safe and happy learning environment, Yukizome-sensei.“ She twists in her seat. “What do you think, Sonia-san? You’ve got an opinion, right?”

Sonia stares back at her.

“That’s enough, Kuzuryuu-san,” Yukizome says, after the silence has turned painful. “Let’s move on. We’re a small class today, so—”

“No,” Sonia interrupts. She stands, tips of her fingers set on the desktop. “Kuzuryuu-san is correct. I do have an opinion.”

“Oh yeah?” Natsumi says. “It’s about time. Let’s hear it, then. Princess Perfect comes clean. Or as close to it as you can get, huh?”

“Kuzuryuu-san has no place in this classroom,” Sonia tells Yukizome. She keeps the line of her gaze high, over Natsumi’s head. “She has no one’s best interests at heart but her own. She is selfish, unpleasant, and underhanded.” Natsumi grins up at her, but Sonia still refuses to look down. “However, it is not because she is inherently malicious, as she would have you believe. It is because she is a coward.“

Natsumi feels her smile fall off her face.

“She is small, and she is afraid.” Sonia tilts her chin up and her eyes down, until Natsumi is at the end of her nose. “Nothing less,” she says, “and nothing more.”

“You’ve got me all figured out, huh?” Natsumi snaps. “All because of that one time I got the better of you? Are you embarrassed that you got it so wrong, Sonia-san?” 

Yukizome flutters between them, expression pained. “Girls, please,” she says. “We’ll sit together after class to resolve this, alright?” She sets the heel of her hand against Natsumi’s shoulder, firm.

Natsumi rolls her shoulders back to shake her off. “Here’s a tip,” she snarls at Sonia. She sits up, and braces herself on the back of her chair. “You don’t know anything about me. You never did. You never _will._ ”

“I see,” Sonia says. “That is it, then.” She bows, military-sharp. “I apologize, Yukizome-sensei, but I must take my leave as well. I find it difficult and unpleasant to learn in such a hostile environment, and I have preparations of my own to complete.”

Yukizome reaches for her elbow when she brushes past. “Sonia-san—”

“I will be back for homeroom tomorrow morning.” She sets her fingers over the back of Yukizome’s hand, but her smile is small, diplomatic, and fake. “I am sorry.”

The classroom is silent, even after the sharp sound of Sonia’s heels fades into the distance.

Mitarai is looking at her. It’s a cool, level stare, one that reminds her of the very first day of class. “You got something you wanna say, Mitarai-kun?” she prompts. “Go on. Everybody else does.”

He doesn’t, it turns out. He averts his eyes, the same way he did that first day, and gathers his books up against his chest. He walks out without a word, head low and shoes scuffling. 

Yukizome doesn’t even try, this time.

“Welp! Looks like that’s it.” Natsumi swings herself out of her desk. Peko follows suit, rising in a single, smooth motion. “Speaking of, _I’ve_ really got better things to do than sit around listening to you talk to yourself, so I think I’m gonna bail too.” She looks back over her shoulder. “Oh, I guess Nanami-san is still here. But she barely counts, right?” 

“You didn’t always used to be this way, Kuzuryuu-san,” Nanami murmurs.

Natsumi pretends not to have heard. She knows who she is now. She isn’t responsible for anyone else. “You had a good run, Yukizome-sensei.” She swings her bag up onto her shoulder. “But you really should learn to know when you’re beaten.”

When she and Peko leave, Nanami is the only one still in the room, fingers wrapped tight around her stupid little game.

*

She and Peko are back in her dorm before curfew. It’s easy to be, since she dropped all of her clubs, and it isn't like she isn't busy. There’s always work to be done, or work to be made.

Sleep doesn’t come on its own, and hasn’t for a while. That’s fine; it means she gets more done. She spends the first few hours after class checking in with the new recruits in Osaka. When that’s done, she starts researching the leads Enoshima brought to her last Tuesday.

When that’s done, it’s dark outside, and she can still see Satou’s face on the inside of her eyelids.

Peko’s phone pings in her pocket. Then it pings again. And again. It pings so many times in a row that the sound keeps cutting itself off, lilting chimes played over top of each other in jagged increments.

Natsumi grinds her knuckles against her eyes. “What’s he want _now?_ ”

Peko doesn’t reply right away. When Natsumi looks over, she has her phone in her hand, frowning at the screen. 

“Well?”

Peko’s eyes flick up, then back down again. She dims the phone and puts it back in her pocket. “He’s frustrated that I’m no longer responding to his messages,” she says.

“That’s it?” Natsumi says. “That was, like, five messages, at _least_.”

Peko won’t meet her eye. She has her gaze at a stubborn half-mast, focused on the baseboard at the other side of the room. “Sometimes he gets very frustrated,” she answers. 

Natsumi sits up, one elbow on the back of her chair. She studies Peko’s face, and then says, “Read it.”

Peko hesitates. It’s as damning as anything.

“I said, _read_ it.”

“Yes, young mistress.” Peko pulls the phone back out from her pocket. The light from the screen casts a glare on the lenses of her glasses. “‘I know you’re reading these,’” she recites. “‘And I know what’s going on. Is she that much of a coward? She doesn’t—’” She breathes in, and when she lifts her head Natsumi can see the whites of her eyes again. “Young mistress, is it necessary to—”

“Yes,” Natsumi snaps. “Keep going.”

“‘She doesn’t have the right to treat you like a—’” The words stick. Peko’s jaw locks, and when she starts again the words come out halting and uncoordinated, like a child learning to read without processing meaning. “‘Like a piece of fucking property. She’s out of control. I’m gonna handle it. Don’t worry.’”

Natsumi folds both arms over the back of her chair and lets each word settle over her, until they’re bone-deep and boiling. Peko watches her, phone still held face-up in her palm. The backlight eventually turns off on its own.

“Are you worried, Peko?” Natsumi asks, cheek against her elbow.

“No, young mistress.”

“Do you think I’m out of control?”

“No, young mistress.”

“Do you think there’s something my brother needs to _handle?_ ”

“Not to my knowledge, young mistress.”

Natsumi holds her hand out. “Give me the phone.”

She does, without objection.

Peko has had the same phone since Natsumi first went to middle school. Natsumi’s father agreed to it only because Natsumi had demanded it: what was the point of having a tool at all, she’d argued, if they were going to be separated with no way to keep in contact?

It’s an old, clunky thing. Natsumi thinks the only reason it still works is because Peko hardly ever uses it. There are three saved contacts: Natsumi, Peko’s weapons-master back at the compound, and Fuyuhiko.

Peko waits in silence while Natsumi scrolls through the text history.

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
12:17  
so apparently there’s this old street cat hanging around during lunch now

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
12:17  
the others are calling it miruku

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
12:17  
a white cat. called miruku. real fucking original

**me**  
12:18  
(Smiling Cat Face With Open Mouth )

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
12:20  
you really like that one huh

**me**  
12:20  
It seemed appropriate.

**me**  
12:22  
Should I refrain from using them in the future?

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
12:22  
no it’s fine

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
12:24  
if my sister can average ten of those things per text you can use however many you damn well please

 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
12:33  
sorry about earlier

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
12:33  
I was out of line

**me**  
12:57  
There’s no need to apologize.

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
12:57  
are you serious? of course there’s a need!

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
12:59  
nobody’s got any right to talk to you like that. including me

**me**  
13:13  
There is not.

**me**  
13:13  
Your concerns were appreciated, though unwarranted. You should not apologize for feeling strongly.

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
13:13  
godDAMMIT peko

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
13:13  
do you not listen to a single fucking word I say??

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
13:40  
sorry 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
13:40  
again

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
13:40  
you can point out the irony if you want

**me**  
13:42  
I won’t.

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
13:42  
yeah

 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
15:30  
hey. I need your help again

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
15:30  
miruku’s being a little asshole and I can’t figure out how to shake her

 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
17:02  
look I’m sorry I called the cat an asshole, but she is, all right?

 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
12:17  
how’s school going? ok?

 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
13:05  
peko?

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
13:16  
can you at least tell me if you’re getting these or not?

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
13:21  
fuck this, I’m texting her

 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
10:02  
hey

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
10:02  
I know the stuff with natsumi is a shit show right now but congrats on your practical exam

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
10:03  
you did a good job

**me**  
10:04  
Thank you.

**me**  
10:04  
I didn’t realize you’d be watching.

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
10:06  
well yeah. yours got broadcast the same as everybody else’s. why wouldn’t I watch it?

**me**  
10:06  
_(Draft)_ I don’t know.

 

**me**  
15:56  
I’m sorry.

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
15:56  
what have you got to be sorry for?

**me**  
15:57  
I feel responsible.

**me**  
15:58  
It wasn’t my intention to damage your relationship with the young mistress.

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
16:12  
what the fuck?

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
16:12  
did she tell you that?

**me**  
16:13  
Will you speak to her, please?

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
16:13  
no 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
16:22  
look, I’m pissed at her, not you

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
16:22  
if I see her now I can’t guarantee I won’t slap the shit out of her

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
16:22  
it’s about time I finally got sick of her bullshit anyway

 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
09:10  
are you okay?

**me**  
09:10  
Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
09:10  
don’t give me that

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
09:11  
I need one person to tell me the fucking truth for once

**me**  
09:11  
It is the truth.

**me**  
09:11  
I fulfilled my purpose. There is nothing for me to be ashamed of.

 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
23:21  
listen I’ve been thinking about what you said and I know you’re not going to like it and I know I said I wouldn’t bring it up again but I can’t sit around on my ass acting like I’m okay with it anymore. she took it way too fucking far. doesn’t it bother you? even a little bit? 

 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
01:47  
peko?

 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
14:08  
will you just get her to fucking talk to me? I sent her ANOTHER goddamn message and she’s STILL fucking ignoring me. if I have to fight one of these pussy security guards to get over there I fucking will

 

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
21:49  
I know you’re reading these

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
21:49  
and I know what’s going on. is she that much of a coward?

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
21:49  
she doesn’t have the right to treat you like a piece of fucking property

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
21:50  
she’s out of control. I’m gonna handle it

**Fuyuhiko-sama**  
21:50  
don’t worry

Natsumi relaxes her fingers until the phone slips out of her grip. It hits the floor corner-first, and cracks explode across the screen. When she stands up, she lets the rest of it crunch under the ball of her foot, until the backlight flickers and cuts out.

Peko is looking at her feet.

Natsumi pulls her own phone out of her pocket and sends a single message:

**me**  
22:04  
(Fountain ) (Clock Face Twelve Oclock ≊ Twelve O’Clock)

*

She and Peko get there first. She means to be early; it gives her an advantage.

It’s her favorite fountain on the school’s grounds. It’s small, and made of warm, burnished metal. The spouts are shaped like leaves on the ends of long stems, and water tumbles off the edges of them in sheets. It burbles instead of roars.

It’s tucked away in a little nook on the western side of grounds, out of the path of visiting tour groups by virtue of not being historical enough or impressive enough to warrant wasting time on. It’s flanked by two rickety, decorative benches on either side, and framed up above by a drooping wisteria tree. This year’s blossoms have already fallen off and been swept away, like they were never there.

The fountain is turned off, after hours. The water is so still it looks almost black when she leans over to check her reflection.

She hears him when he shows up. He’s doing it on purpose, she knows, letting wayward twigs snap under his heels. He could be quiet if he wanted to, but he knows he got second place. He’s early, too, just not early enough to beat her.

He’s dressed down for the night, in an undershirt and the straight-legged running pants he sleeps in. He has both hands deep in his pockets. His hair is getting too long. He still looks more like himself than he ever did in the reserve course’s travesty of a uniform.

He says, “Hey.”

She sits on the outer rim of the fountain’s wide basin and crosses her legs at the ankle. “‘Hey’?” she echoes. “That’s it? I was expecting a lot more after that rant you sent Peko.”

His eyes slide right. Peko is behind her, staring into middle distance, pretending not to listen. “It’s late,” is his excuse. “Nevermind that those texts weren’t _for_ you.”

Natsumi’s laugh slices through the still air of the courtyard.

“Sorry, sorry,” she says, when he glares at her. “I’m just— It _has_ to be funny, right? That you’re still this clueless?” She pinches a lock of her hair between her fingers, and inspects the split ends. “It’s okay, though. That’s why we’re here, so I can explain things to you. That’s what a good big sister does.”

“I don’t need you to explain shit to me,” he says. “I know exactly what you’re doing.”

“Do you?” She leans over to root around in the interior pockets of her bag. “I’m serious. Do you? Because you’re treading a dangerous line, Fuyu-chan.” She tosses what’s left of Peko’s phone out onto the concrete between them. “And I’d really, really like it better if it was just a simple misunderstanding.”

She gives him time to get a good look. He wants to scream at her; she can see it in the flush of his face, and hear it in the sharp suck of breath between his teeth. “Yeah,” he says, volume forced into a hissing whisper. “I do. I know you killed a civilian over your pathetic fucking _ego,_ and I know you’re sitting here patting yourself on the back for it.”

She lets go of the edge of the fountain. There’s a wide, red indentation on the heel of her hand when she smooths it over her knee. “You don’t,” she says, and for all that she tries to keep her voice steady, she can still feel anger vibrating beneath the surface. “Don’t pretend like you know a single thing about me, anymore.”

“Why?” he demands. “Does it fuck with your perfect justification if I know how afraid you are that she was right all along?” 

“I was protecting _you,_ ” she snaps. “From her, from the school. From your own fucking _stupidity._ ”

“Bullshit,” he says. “That’s such fucking bullshit. You can’t get on my ass about being a shitty liar when you try to say crap like that with a straight face.” He spreads his arms out wide. “Just admit it. You never gave two fucking shits about me. Dragging me here was always about making you feel better about all the shit you caused yourself.”

“What, I was supposed to give you what _you_ wanted?” She’s on her feet before she can convince herself to stay where she is. “I was supposed to let you roll over like a fucking dog so some talentless _bitch_ could say she outsmarted us? I was supposed to let this school think they could pull my strings whenever they wanted?” He holds his ground, even when she’s standing over him. “Well, guess what? They know better now. They know what our clan will be once I’m in charge. And I’m not going to let _you_ fuck that up for me.”

The courtyard is silent. There’s no breeze. There aren’t even bugs. The school’s groundskeepers do everything they can to keep everything sterile and pristine.

“She _was_ right all along,” he says, without an ounce of shame or hesitation. “You think I’m the one giving the clan a bad name? Look in a fucking mirror, Natsumi.”

Her heart pounds in her ears. He jerks his chin up, stubborn and defiant, and something low in her stomach _burns,_ anger and humiliation and betrayal simmering together.

She tilts her head to the side and says, “Peko.”

Fuyuhiko’s brow pinches. He doesn’t understand. He wouldn’t. He’s too soft and too stupid to see what’s happened, the only response he’s left her with. He thinks she’s soft, too.

She isn’t.

Peko understands, though. Natsumi knows she does, because she always understands, even without having to be told. She’s quiet, and then she whispers, “Yes.”

Natsumi holds her hand out. “Lend me your sword for a sec.”

“Young mistress—”

Natsumi doesn’t look over. She flexes the fingers of her outstretched hand. “Did that sound like a question?”

Peko doesn't say anything else.

The blade sings out of its sheath instead, a ring of metal on metal. Fuyuhiko watches Peko do it; he's always watching her, all the time. Like he can't look away. Like she's the most important thing in the room. Like she's more important than respect, or tradition, or his own flesh and blood. Natsumi thinks if he spent less time preoccupied with her and more time on himself, he'd actually manage to recognize the position he's in.

But he'll get there. He's putting the pieces together now, she can see it in the jittery jump of his eyes from Peko's face to hers. His hands curl into fists at his sides, and he says, “Natsumi,” like a warning. 

Peko sets the hilt of her katana into Natsumi’s open palm. It’s heavier than she expects, and she has to catch the pommel with her other hand to keep the tip from hitting the ground. For all that it always looked weightless and graceful in Peko’s hands, it feels heavy and unwieldy in hers.

“Natsumi,” Fuyuhiko says again.

She readjusts her grip, and tries to remember. Ippon-me. Nihon-me. Sanbon-me. Yonhon-me. Years of watching and assessing and memorizing, and none of it comes to her now, when it matters, Peko’s sword clumsy in her hands.

“I am the clan, you know,” she tells him. “I’m the foundation. I mean, sure, Dad’ll truck on for a while, but I’m not trying to just be what Dad is. We’re going to be better, understand? We’re going to be more than we’ve ever been, and it’s going to be because of _me._ ”

“Put the goddamn sword down, Natsumi,” he says.

“I gave Satou her chances. I gave her too many, if you ask me.” She levels the tip of the sword at him. The weight of it stretches the bend of her elbow far enough to hurt. “I gave you yours, too.”

He lunges at her. It’s impulsive and stupid, the way he’s always been. Maybe he thinks she’s bluffing, or that sentiment will make her hesitate. It’s just more proof that he doesn’t know a single thing about her.

The blade swings out. She could stop it. She could drop it, or pull it back, or press it out to the side. 

She doesn’t. 

It catches him across the face. It’s a clumsy, uncoordinated cut; when the tip catches on the hard ridge of bone over his eye, she fumbles the hilt to keep it from slipping out of her hands. It slides the blade back, deeper, until it jostles back out and tears up toward his scalp. 

She expects blood, but she doesn’t expect it to spray the way it does. All at once there are damp spots on her sleeve and the top half of her blouse. Some of it gets in her hair. It’s abruptly hot and then even more abruptly cold, and the smell of it burns her eyes and her nose and the back of her throat.

There are spots in her vision. She stumbles to keep herself upright.

Her brother is doubled-over, both hands clutched over his face. At first she thinks she might have slashed him sideways across both eyes, but when she’s steady enough to look again, there’s only blood spilling from the right side of his face. 

“What the fuck,” he wheezes between breaths, “what the _fuck._ ”

He’s hyperventilating. He’ll pass out if he doesn’t get it together.

“I tried to help you,” she tells him. Distantly, it registers that she’s begun to shout. Her throat is constricted and raw. “This school wouldn’t see what you could do, _you_ wouldn’t see it, but _I_ did. And this is the fucking thanks I get?” She drags the sword back up. The blade shrieks against concrete. “How much longer am I supposed to let you drag me down?”

A hand clamps around her wrist, light but firm. 

When she looks, Peko is looking back at her.

They’ve been walking in each other’s footprints since the day they were born, and Natsumi has never once seen Peko the way she is now, eyes big with uncertainty and fear. “Young mistress,” she says, unsteady. “That’s enough. Please.”

Natsumi twists her wrist. Peko doesn’t try to hold her; she drops her hand and draws herself back, head low and elbows tucked in against her torso. The little clearing is silent, save for Fuyuhiko’s labored breathing.

Natsumi drags her free hand through her hair. It smears the blood there further in, and the smell hangs around her face, acrid. She can hold in the bile that bubbles up in her throat, but not the laughter.

“What,” she says, “the _fuck_ is this?”

“I believe that Fuyuhiko-sama now understands the gravity of the position you’re in, young mistress,” Peko says to the ground. “It’s unnecessary to—”

“I’m sorry,” Natsumi interrupts. Peko doesn’t flinch, but she does close her eyes, which is close enough. “Since when do you decide what’s _necessary_ and what’s not?”

“I would never presume to make your decisions for you, young mistress,” Peko replies, fingers closed into tight fists at her sides. “I was only concerned that you….” She cuts herself off. She bends her bow deeper, until her braids hang nearly perpendicular to the ground. “Forgive me.”

“No,” Natsumi says, “don’t let me stop you.” She swings both hands out; the sword slices through air just as cleanly as it does everything else. “You’ve got the floor, Peko-chan! Let’s hear what you’ve got to say that’s so important.”

“I spoke out of turn,” Peko murmurs. “I apologize. The mistake was mine.”

“You’re right,” Natsumi tells her. “It was. Too bad saying sorry isn’t good enough to get you out of this, huh?” Peko doesn’t answer. “Talk.”

“You have been in an acute state of stress for two weeks,” Peko answers obediently. Her voice is muffled, with her face turned down so low. “Your sleep has been poor every night during that time. You tried unsuccessfully to sleep three times tonight alone.” She breathes. Her voice shrinks. “I didn’t want you to make a choice you would regret.”

Natsumi bobs her head while she listens, and twists her elbow up to give herself a good look down the length of Peko’s katana. There’s a smear of blood along the sharp edge, and a splatter of it higher up the blade. The longer Natsumi holds it, the more at home it feels in her grip.

“Tell me something,” she says eventually. “What are you without me, Peko-chan?”

Peko is silent.

Natsumi lifts her eyes from the sword, and lets her stare burn into the top of Peko’s skull. “I asked you a question.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Fuyuhiko snarls behind her. His voice is breathy and strained. “Shut the _fuck_ up, Natsumi.”

“Nothing,” Peko answers, without looking up.

“Close!” Natsumi says. “Without me, you’re a pocket knife someone dropped down a sewer drain.” She pins the tip of the sword into the dirt at Peko’s feet, so she can see the smear of blood on it for herself. “You’re pointless. Useless. Forgotten. Is that what you want?”

“No, young mistress.”

Natsumi throws the sword down between them.

Peko opens her eyes. Her shallow breathing stops. She understands, without needing to be told.

“I have a situation,” Natsumi says. “Handle it.”

Peko doesn’t move. “I….” Her voice is small. It’s nearly empty breath, and it nearly falls backwards into her chest. “I am never to raise my weapon against a member of the Kuzuryuu family—”

“That’s fine.” Peko still isn’t looking at her. Natsumi smiles anyway. “Consider this the exception.” 

“Master Kuzuryuu has expressly forbidden—”

“Who do you take orders from?” Natsumi demands. “Is it him? Or is it me?”

The question hangs in the air. Peko’s shoulders droop. The anxiety in her voice flattens into nothing. “You, young mistress.”

“And who’s giving you this order, right now?”

“You, young mistress.”

“Pick it up,” she orders.

Peko squeezes her eyes shut again.

“You and me,” Natsumi spits in her face. “Always. No matter what happens.” She kicks the sword’s hilt with the heel of her shoe. It spins lazily, metal whining. “Pick. It. _Up._ ”

Peko bends.

“Don’t do this.” Fuyuhiko has both hands clapped over the right side of his face, now, but blood and milky fluid still ooze out between his fingers. He can’t stand up straight. Natsumi’s impressed he’s still standing at all. “ _Natsumi._ Don’t— don’t make her do this.”

“You can’t put this all on me,” she snarls at him. “She made her choice. _You_ made _yours._ ” Peko draws herself back up, katana in her grip, and Natsumi falls back to her shoulder. “Well, this is me making _mine._ ”

His elbows are trembling. He has to drop his hands, and his fingers draw messy tracks through the blood on his face when he does.

When she was four, she’d thrown paint in his face after she’d gotten bored during finger painting. Red and blue and yellow. He screeched at her and chased her around the room, until the both of them had left enough hand- and foot- and elbowprints to occupy the maids for an entire week.

Their parents had come home early that day. She’d tried to wipe it off his face before they could see, but she’d only smeared it worse over his cheeks.

“Natsumi,” he gasps again, “ _please._ ”

Her baby brother, who always used to cry when he was afraid.

She steps back, and Peko steps into her place. The balance of her katana is effortless in her fingers, the blade a single smooth, unwavering line in the darkness.

Peko stands tall, her shoulders steady and square. She dwarfs him, his body bent and hunched and twisted, but he doesn’t try to run from her. He only stares up into her face, searching.

“This doesn’t change anything,” he manages. His voice is hoarse and thick. “Understand? I- I fucked up. I should’ve done more. I should’ve tried harder.” She sets her open palm against the mangled right side of his face, and his breath comes out in a wet, shuddering gasp. “Peko, I’m— I’m sorry.”

The courtyard is still. Natsumi forces herself to keep her eyes open.

Peko drives the full length of her katana through his abdomen. There is a quiet hiss of breath, and then silence again.

She doesn’t let his body drop, the way she did with Satou’s. She doesn’t twist the hilt of her blade or shove him off it with the base of her foot, the way Natsumi has seen her do to other marks before now. She draws her blade back and out, dark metal streaked scarlet, and it tumbles from her fingers with a clatter. She leaves it there in the dirt, and scoops both arms under Fuyuhiko’s shoulders to hold him against her when he buckles. 

There’s no shouting or screaming or panicking. His face presses into the juncture of Peko’s neck and shoulder when she sinks with him to the ground, and he clings to her back, or tries to. His fingers are too uncoordinated and smeared with blood to get a proper grip. He’s talking, something quiet and slurred and rambling.

Natsumi turns her back, and bends over the fountain when her stomach rolls. A pocket of damp air rushes up into her face and disperses the smell of hot metal, so she stays there, gut trembling.

“Sorry,” he’s saying. “S’okay. Peko. S’okay. I’m a fuckin’... I’m not… I’m….”

Satou died faster than this. Maybe Peko’s lost her touch, or her nerve. 

Natsumi squeezes both eyes shut. Her nails split on the sharp edge of the basin. She focuses on the pain, on the smell of stale water, on the thrum of adrenaline in her throat. Anything to drown it out.

When she opens her eyes again, her lashes are wet, and something has disturbed the flat surface of the fountain. Thin ripples smash into each other from all directions, and her reflection warps, stretched and compressed in waves.

Eventually, the stuttering stream of his voice slows, then fades, then stops. There’s a shift, the damp sound of fabric peeling back, and the slow intake of Peko’s breath.

Natsumi turns around.

Peko is laying Fuyuhiko out on the ground in front of her. She cups one hand against his cheek to tilt his head toward her, and away from Natsumi. (But there’s blood in his hair from where Natsumi split his eye open, and she can see Satou still, face frozen and empty. Peko’s patronization protects her from nothing.) He looks small in her hands, like he weighs nothing at all. His chest doesn’t move.

She sits up tall when she’s finished, fists on her knees. The front of her blouse sags shiny and wet with blood, and the chocolate brown of her skirt has turned to something murky and sickly. It’s smeared on her knuckles and up her forearms, and soaked into her collar where her neck meets her shoulder. It’s on her cheek, under her glasses, and in her hair. 

Bright red makes her skin look ashen. Natsumi’s always thought so, and always told her so. It’s why Peko stopped wearing red ribbons in her hair, as a child.

If not for Fuyuhiko’s corpse spread out in front of her, someone might think she was the one who bled out.

“Young mistress,” she says. “I am finished.”

*

The official police report calls him the second victim of an unknown assailant on the school. They are actively encouraging anyone with any information on the case to step forward. There are no leads at this time.

The school goes on full lockdown. The students are packed in with each other, most clubs suspended without further notice, and the rumor mill churns. Some say Satou was secretly a yakuza princess, the daughter of a rival clan whose death started a war. Others say she and Fuyuhiko were seeing each other in secret, and were punished by the Kuzuryuus when they were found out. Someone somewhere whispers that the school itself was behind it, and that the reserve course is to Hope’s Peak like a prized hog is to a butcher.

Natsumi listens to all of them, and Peko reports to her the ones said out of earshot. No one comes to her for independent verification.

They don't want to know the truth, anyway.

*

Her brother’s funeral is on a Thursday. She and Peko are given three days of official bereavement leave: two travel days, and the funeral itself. 

There are light refreshments, after the service. Natsumi doesn’t have time to take any, but it’s fine; her stomach is too twisted and shriveled to contemplate even the cheap, flaky digestives at the low end of the table.

She receives the family in a line out on the grass, Peko behind her left shoulder. There’s no smarming or schmoozing or simpering. None of them touch her, not even her aunt, who so often reaches to clutch her face without asking. They all wring their hands and avert their eyes when it’s their turn to face her.

It’s terrible, they all say. They talk about her brother in different ways, about how he was sharp-edged and bright, full of life, the flip side of her coin, but when the bullshit’s done they all land on that same adjective. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.

Natsumi stares at every one of them until they shrink away from her, cowed and afraid, and feels nothing.

*

On her first day back at school, Enoshima is sitting at her lunch table, waiting. Her shake today is strawberry, bright enough pink that it hurts Natsumi’s eyes. 

“Welcome back, senpai,” she chirps. “Got time to chat?”

Natsumi sits down across from her. Peko stands to the side, hands folded loosely behind her back. “Five minutes,” Natsumi says. “Talk.”

“That’s more than you gave me the first time,” Enoshima says. “I call that progress!” She stirs the straw of her shake with one finger, her chin on the heel of her other hand. “But I’m not here to waste your time, or mine. I hear you’re in the market for a new right hand.”

“My brother’s body isn’t even cold,” Natsumi tells her.

“You're right. And we're all gonna miss Fuyuhiko-kun and his special brand of friendship.” Enoshima leans forward on her elbows. Her voice dips low. “But is the business going to wait the appropriate amount of time for grieving? Are the Azumas gonna consider the well-being of your family before they muscle in on our new turf?” 

She stretches her neck out to suck on the straw of her shake. “Well, they probably will, actually. Just not in the good way. You get what I mean, right, senpai? You need somebody to watch your back while you go through this difficult time.” She touches the tips of her fingers to the edges of her smile. “And I’m just the girl for you.”

Natsumi sits back in her seat. She busies herself with cracking open the lid of her lunch. “If you do a good job, Enoshima-kun,” she answers. “Maybe I’ll consider it.”

Enoshima’s smile cuts bright and sharp, back toward her ears.

“Enoshima-kun this, Enoshima-kun that,” she drawls. “Come on! We’re friends now, aren’t we?” She reaches across the table to lace their fingers together. Natsumi lets her, hands loose. “You can call me Junko.”


End file.
